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If you fly over parts of Tsavo today—and I challenge anyone to do so, if you have the eyes for it – you can see lines of snares set out in funnel traps that extend four or five miles. Tens of thousands of animals are being killed annually for the meat business. Carnivores are being decimated in the same snares and discarded. I am not a propagandist on this issue, but when my friends say we are very concerned that hunting will be reintroduced in Kenya, let me put it to you: hunting has never been stopped in Kenya, and there is more hunting in Kenya today than at any time since independence. (Thousands) of animals are being killed annually with no control. Snaring, poisoning, and shooting are common things. So when you have a fear of debate about hunting, please don’t think there is no hunting. Think of a policy to regulate it, so that we can make it sustainable. That is surely the issue, because an illegal crop, an illegal market is unsustainable in the long term, whatever it is. And the market in wildlife meat is unsustainable as currently practiced, and something needs to be done.

-Richard Leakey, in an address to the Strathmore Business School, Nairobi

Richard Leakey, of course, is the renowned paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and the first director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, the man who was in large part responsible for scotching the ivory trade during the initial round of the Elephant Wars in the 1980s.

I interviewed Leakey a few years ago for my book, Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife (University of California Press, 2012). His words came back to me with the brouhaha over the shooting of Cecil, the most lionized lion on the planet. So did the words of many of the other people I interviewed for the book. That includes Ian Parker, a legendary Kenyan game ranger and warden; Michael Norton-Griffiths, who served as the senior ecologist for Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park and managed the Eastern Sahel Program for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; Ole Kaparo, a former speaker of the Kenyan Parliament and a leader of the Laikipia Maasai people; and Laurence Frank, an emeritus associate of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Biology and one of Africa’s most respected carnivore biologists.

Ultimately, wild animals are disappearing in Africa because they are worthless to the people who live with and near them.

All these men no doubt are upset to varying degrees byl’affaire Cecil—but not for reasons one may think. They’re probably more distressed by the response to the shooting than the shooting itself. That’s because the uproar over Cecil, the fervent calls for expanding the bans on trophy hunting in Africa, will work against African wildlife conservation in general and carnivore conservation in particular.

As Leakey points out, regulated hunting—even poorly regulated hunting, as seems the case with Cecil in Zimbabwe—isn’t the driving force in the decline of the African lion, which has fallen from a continental population of around 200,000 to fewer than 20,000 today. Unregulated hunting is the main culprit: Industrial-scale poaching and bushmeat hunting. Ancillary reasons include the inexorable expansion of agriculture and the increasing populations of pastoral peoples, who inhabit their ancestral rangelands in ever-increasing numbers, spearing or poisoning any predator that could pose a threat to their cattle and goats. And it’s also the booming illegal trade in wildlife parts. More than one field biologist I talked to told me how wild animals—particularly predators, rhinos, and elephants—are disappearing in proportion to the rapid expansion of Chinese-funded development projects. Ivory and rhino horn, of course, remain highly prized in China, and lion bone is considered an “acceptable” substitute for tiger bone in traditional Asian medicine; lion and leopard claws and teeth also are much sought after.

An African savannah devoid of lumbering pachyderms and lolling lions may make a New York animal rights activist weep, but to a Samburu pastoralist or Kikuyu subsistence farmer it constitutes a lovely prospect.

But ultimately, wild animals are disappearing in Africa because they are worthless to the people who live with and near them. Kenya’s hunting ban has been in effect since 1977. During that time, the country’s wildlife has declined by more than 70 percent. The country’s subsistence farmers and pastoralists can derive no legitimate utility from the animals. Indeed, wildlife makes their lives harder. Elephants raid their crops, destroy their water systems, stomp cattle and the occasional farmer. Lions, hyenas, and leopards kill their livestock. Better to shoot the elephant and poison the lion. An African savannah devoid of lumbering pachyderms and lolling lions may make a New York animal rights activist weep, but to a Samburu pastoralist or Kikuyu subsistence farmer it constitutes a lovely prospect, one promising peaceful nights uninterrupted by the trumpeting of elephants raiding the pumpkin patch or the squeals of goats enduring evisceration by hungry lions.

But what about eco-tourism? Why hasn’t that helped? Don’t the eco-lodges sprouting across Kenya like mushrooms after the Long Rains deliver cash, goods, and services to local communities? Aren’t they a very good thing? In a word, no. First, these lodges constitute permanent physical footprints on the wild landscape. They require roads and other infrastructure, and thus fragment wildlife habitat. Locals tend to congregate around them, driving game further afield.

Further, many of the lodges are owned by foreign entrepreneurs and corporations, and the profits tend to trickle up to their proprietors and Kenya’s deeply corrupt oligarchs, not down to the poor farmers and herdsmen on the land.

Michael Norton-Griffiths observes the situation is analogous to a man whose only asset is a goat. But this particular goat comes with many strings attached. The man owns the goat, but he can’t sell it or eat it. In fact, he can’t “exploit” the goat in anyway. The only thing he’s allowed to do is let tourists drive by and take pictures of it. Oh, one more thing: he doesn’t get any money from photo-snapping goat enthusiasts. All profits go to the guys driving the tourist buses. Kenya’s rural residents, in other words, are responsible for the country’s wildlife, but they aren’t allowed to benefit from it.

In any evaluation of Africa’s wildlife crisis, Namibia must be considered. That’s because there isn’t a wildlife crisis in Namibia. At the time of its independence from South Africa in 1990, Namibia’s game populations were at historic lows, decimated by years of combat between locals and the South African army. The new government wanted to encourage both a wildlife rebound and tourism, but it took a tack directly opposite from Kenya’s. Rural populations were organized into communities controlling vast areas of land. Where necessary, the wildlands were restocked with game. Each community was invested with the right to manage its own wildlife resources, subject to certain broad dictates from Namibian national wildlife agencies. In other words, game was commoditized. It could be cropped for commercial meat production; it could be eaten by community members; the rights to hunt trophy specimens of charismatic species could be sold. Suddenly, wildlife had great value for people living in the Namibian bush, and they reacted predictably: They protected their assets.

I saw this dynamic in action at Salambala Conservancy in Caprivi, a lush northern Namibian province watered by the Okavango and Zambezi Rivers. A holding of the Subia people, Salambala is “small” by Namibian conservancy standards, but still vast by any objective accounting: 230,000 acres. The community and the central government have established sustainable annual quotas for almost every species inhabiting the land, right down to game birds: 50 impala, seven African buffalo, fifty zebras, four kudus, four waterbucks, four hippos, three crocodiles, three baboons, two black-backed jackals, 100 white-faced ducks, 150 turtle doves, 50 guinea fowl, and 70 red-billed francolins. The quota for elephants is eight, with six going to trophy hunters, one dedicated to the community’s chief and elders, and one reserved for distribution among conservancy members. (Lions are still relatively rare in Namibia, though their reintroduction proceeds in certain areas. One reason Namibia remains Africa’s cheetah stronghold is the dearth of lions, which reflexively kill the smaller cats; where lions are prevalent, cheetahs, axiomatically, are scarce. Cheetahs, by the way, are also included in the trophy quota of some community conservancies.)

It’s easier to scream in outrage over the killing of a highly charismatic lion with a cute name, sign a Change.org petition, and move on to posting selfies, than it is to actually investigate the deep forces behind the African wildlife holocaust.

The community keeps all income generated from trophy hunters and meat sales. Prior to independence and the establishment of Salambala, any Subia community member who poached an animal likely would have met with praise; his act would’ve meant meat for family, friends and neighbors. Now, the illegal taking of game is considered a major offense, theft from the community as a whole. Shortly before my arrival, the remains of a blue wildebeest had been found, and local administrators quickly determined that a community member was responsible for the killing. They cheerfully predicted he would soon be apprehended, beaten severely, and handed over to government authorities for additional punishment.

Ultimately, then, the African wildlife crisis is a crisis of misperception. Conservation has been subsumed by animal rights. These are not, however, the same things. Individual animals—most recently Cecil and Jericho—have become more important in the Age of Social Media than species stability, habitat preservation, and pragmatic if uncomfortable policies that would actually encourage the preservation of wildlife. This is understandable: It’s easier to scream in outrage over the killing of a highly charismatic lion with a cute name, sign a Change.org petition, and move on to posting selfies, than it is to actually investigate the deep forces behind the African wildlife holocaust. But emoting over Cecil isn’t going to save the African lion. The African lion is not the Lion King, just as Daffy Duck is not representative of a typical mallard in a North American marsh. We don’t live in a cartoon, and our problems are not solved by anthropomorphizing wildlife. Blanket trophy hunting bans may make us feel better, but they will only accelerate the slaughter.

One in a series of personal Perspectives. We invite writers and readers to submit their own essays—inspiration can come from California magazine or California Magazine Online stories, the news, or issues of the day. Read more:

This is nonsense, and the words of a man without economic, social or business mind.
There is a way to monetize the wild animals, and protect them in the wild.
Tourists Photography is in fact profitable! Jobs for guides, etc.
But first you have to remove the corruption from the system, which this author does not mention.
If he shared his words about protecting these animals, bringing those to justice who promote illegal killings, and illegal trade, and trapping, this would stop. If those in charge, government officials, etc. where to change their evil ways then they would fight to protect the animals instead of having two blind eyes.
Jobs in tourism would increase, jobs in conservation, etc. would be there to protect these animals in the wild animal parks.
But instead you say continue hunting, both legal and illegal, but you don’t throw those people in these countries, or those internationally, who continue this destructive behavior.
You are part of the problem, you are not providing true solutions.

Mark Galanty wrote: “But first you have to remove the corruption from the system, which this author does not mention.”
Yes, that sounds very nice. But just how many more species would go extinct in the decades — or centuries — that it would take to remove the corruption from African societies?

As I said Alex, you are part of the problem, and not part of the solution of endangered species.
I imagine that during the slave trade days, you would argue to continue allowing corrupt African leaders to profit from the trading of poor villagers, therefore saving other African ethnic groups. Some Africans had made a business out of capturing Africans from neighboring ethnic groups or war captives and selling them. This was at that time exactly what people say.
How about Child sex trade. I have heard parents say it is awful, but as long as the child sex traders have a few children in their “care”, they feel safe their own children will not be taken.
And I say you and are making the same arguments today about animals.
You must be trophy hunter mentality to advocated allowing trophy hunting / killing of animals to save other animals.
If you do not make a stand, or make a statement, you are as guilty as the poachers, hunters, killers and corrupt leadership in those countries.
We can not get change with out a strong voice against allowing these practices. I have stopped traveling to those corrupt countries. I have stopped any business with those countries, and I advocate others to boycott the countries that have poor human or animal rights.
In lieu of loss business and tourism, we offer aid for conservation practices.

Mark, no need to get personal here — and as far as accusing me of being “part of the problem” and equating me with a slavery supporter, I have a number of two-word responses to that (mostly ending in “me,” “you,” or “off”) which I imagine would be inappropriate for this site. I will note that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was ended by the use of ships, guns, and soldiers, and offer the not-too-far-out speculation that had the European and American countries that ended it tried to do so instead by ridding African societies of corruption, there would still be slavery today (as there still is in Mauritania, Chad, Sudan, Ghana, Togo, Congo, etc., etc.).

Alex, this is not personal, I promise. “You” refers to those promoting and spinning “The Killing Tourism”, the “Bow” manufactures, the riffle manufactures, those who make money from preparing, stuffing and mounting animals, etc. who have crafted this propaganda message to try and keep trophy hunting as thrill activity. If you look at the messages coming from the animal killing industry you can clearly see that the message of Conservation through sport killing is coordinated P.R. Campaign. Some are seduced by it, and repeat it, and others exclaim it for their own financial well being. I will not place any judgement on any one persons motives, but a quick search will help identify that it is a coordinated PR effort.
I can’t even believe that those high paying public relations firms thought that they could actually get people to believe that Trophy Hunting will stop the demand and desire to kill a rare or endangered species. Ask the two soldiers who are guarding the last remaining white rhino if Trophy Hunting has kept that rhino out from Trophy Hunter’s assassination attempts. The horn is way to valuable because the thrill and Adrenalin of killing this animal is too powerful than just the price on it’s already cut off horn.

Wildlife is managed, conserved and proliferating in Namibia. Kenya’s wildlife has declined by more than 70 percent since it’s ban on hunting, in effect since 1977.
Based on socio-economic reality, it’s working in Namibia. It is not working in Kenya.

I read the article, then read the comments, from which I form some basic conclusions.
We have anti hunters, we have prohunters and with that combination, we have both who realize the illegal activity and corruption, sometimes greed and, in many ways, the will to survive by both humans and aninals.
May we as humans some how learn how to coexist with both, peacefully and in an unselfish manner for both hunter and nonhunter.
The ability for humans to exist with other humans and all creachers of this earth is a complicated issue for both of God’s creations. In reality, I beleve we can find that all resources were placed here on earth for our use, by to be used “wisely”!

Bravo Mr. Martin!
This article should be required reading for all the armchair biologist and outraged internet Illuminati.
Mr. Galanty, you are part of the problem. You don’t understand wildlife management. You don’t understand the culture of Africa. To say that you are going to save the lions by stopping business with corrupt countries and then “offer aid for conservation practices” is laughable.
Once the animals have value, they will be saved. Hunting individuals, under modern wildlife management practices, to save the greater population has shown time and time again to be the most effective way to benefit a species.
I know that fact is inconvenient for the narrative of, ‘peace, love, and coexistence’, but as the author has, go speak with the biologists and wildlife managers that protect animals. Hunting makes the animals more valuable, funds conservation programs, and is healthy for populations.

The problem with your argument is that we have to deal with the world as it is not some fantasyland that you concoct.
The guy who shot this lion paid $52,000 for the right to shoot him. In addition, he must have paid another $50,000 for his Safari expenses. This gives these animals economic value to poverty stricken Africa. That allows game ranchers to survive and establish habitat for African wildlife. It pays for the game wardens who protect these animals from poachers. It also provides incentives for the locals to not kill of lions, elephants and other wildlife that kills them and is destructive to their farms. There is no justification for stopping hunting of these animals and if that is done these unique animals will quickly become extinct.
This lion was near the end of it’s lifespan and would have died anyway within a couple of years. The hunter who killed him contributed to the preservation of lions in Africa while taking an animal that would have died soon anyway.
Only loons who believe that wild animals are as portrayed in Disney moves would be against hunting.

You can add India to your list of complete and utter animal rights failures.There were 47,000 tigers in the hunting blocks of the Maharajas. They were made into National Parks for wildlife photographers, andimal rights activists and bureaucrats. Now there are 1,500 tigers. Some tiger parks have no tigers and the guards carve wooden tiger feet to make pug marks to keep their joby. Kenya and India are the greatest conservation failures in the history of the human race. Eighty per-cent of Kenya’s bongos have been re-introduced from a single sport hunting ranch in Texas.

Mr. Galanty,
You, sir, are a great example of ‘The Problem’. You rail against those who practice an activity of which you don’t approve, yet you do nothing to actually improve the situation.
Instead of castigating sport hunters, why don’t you instead contribute similar funds to non-consumptive African wildlife use. You have a perfect opportunity, as Ivan Carter, a Professional Hunter who leads hunting safaris, has made a generous offer to people such as yourself. He has published an offer to guide up to 100 people who abhor hunting on a photographic ‘hunt’ for Cape Buffalo. You get the same safari experience, some of the proceeds will help fund anti-poaching efforts as well as support local people with paying jobs related to your photo hunt and you will only shoot a buffalo with your camera. The cost would be exactly the same as a regular hunting safari.
Mr. Galant you, this is your opportunity to actually do something constructive instead of judging others and attacking them online. Go ahead, it’s time to step up to the plate. Publish details of your non-consumptive hunt upon your return.
By the way… Who are you to judge hunters? Please, explain to us just what gives you the right or authority to judge me and others who might hunt?

Since its axe grinding time here is my beef. Its easy and cheap to save the Bengal tiger by introducing them into Kakadu National Park in Australia where there is a huge feral animal food base - pigs and buffalo which they eat in India. I can’t see them ever becoming dedicated Koala bear hunters.
Introduce Siberia tigers into Newfoundland where they have a huge introduced moose overpopulation problem, and little agriculture and few people except on the coast. Siberian tigers are native to North America. Their bons have beeen found in Alaska. The one animal they might threaten would be woodland caribou but if that proved to be the case they are very easy to cull from helicopoter in the winter.
As far as desert lions, that require little water, there are thousands of camels for them in Australia’s uninhabited Gibson Desert.

I wish to support Mr. Galanty’s position here and would like to add that Globalization is perhaps the biggest culprit. The indigenous peoples of Africa, who attempt to manage an existence on the land which their ancestors knew are now having to compete in the world market with global corporations. This Is a relatively new development and likely accounts for the trapping and poisoning of African wildlife. I can only assume that individuals living in the big cities are not wringing their hands about marauding wild animals day and night. In addition, the corruption in African governments is , so I have read, the result of the collapse of the cold war between Soviet Russia and the United States. I don’t pretend to understand it fully so I won’t go on. I believe the G 7 countries bear the responsibility for reaching out to African nations in an attempt to make reparations, attempting to work with smalker, less privileged countries in a way that allows their people to live sustainable lives. There are probably very few if any African leaders who would not welcome a constructive dialogue, with the prospect of remuneration and aid directed at protecting borders and improving health care and education. It is an unfortunate fact that wealthy countries would much rather allow their corporations. .as in the case of mining companies..to exploit and get out rather than provide sustainable livelihoods and hope. To allow egregious trophy hunters from Russia, Spain, Germany, the US, etc. to kill already threatened animals so they can mount heads on rec room wall while corporations continue to exploit smacks of first world elitism.

At last some reality and common sense all the way from LA. You couldn’t have put it better than this. Wake a world, Africa is not a fairy land! Sustainable use is the foundation of success in terms of wildlife management. Wildlife has to be valued so much that people (especially the impoverished, the majority in Africa) cannot afford to be without it. And note that I am a hunter, I am a wildlife photographer, I live and breath Africa every single day of my life, I spend more time outdoors than I do in the urbanized world. I support photographic lodges and eco tourism, I support legal, controlled & regulated hunting—-they both benefit wildlife. However, most of Africa does not look like a national geographic or discovery channel production, in reality most of Africa is nothing close to this perception that so many people have. Eco tourism on its own will definitely not protect and enhance wildlife. eco tourism only takes place because people want to and hope to profit from it. There are some regions that are suitable to photo safaris and others which are not. photo safari lodges have to be able to justify very high accommodation rates in order to profit, to thus have enough funding to conduct and fund serious anti poaching, to benefit rural impoverished communities. For this to happen, to charge the BIG $ photo camps require stunning scenery, wildlife in huge abundance particularly frequent sightings of the BIG 5, the iconic species and 5 star accommodations and service. The majority of Africa doesn’t meet these requirements, to justify eco tourism, so regulated controlled, sustainable hunting is the answer. Hunters are happy to spend 21 days in an area walking, tracking and searching for game, they don’t need plush lodges, 5 star service to justify paying large sums of money for the privilege of hunting wild game. This is where hunting is a viable land use, which keeps wild places wild, prevents encroachment, prevents an influx of cattle and other domestic stock (biggest threat to big cats), funds community projects, funds anti poaching—-creates a value for that particular space! Legal controlled sustainable hunting is no threat to wildlife, it creates a value for wildlife and wildlife in Africa must be valued more than a goat or a cow in order for all people (especially the impoverished who are the majority) to prefer wildlife to cattle. Wildlife must be valued so much that humans cannot afford to be without it. Common sense is required—-this is not the lion king, its reality.

What beats me is that the rest of the world is trying to solve Africa’s problems without the faintest idea what they are dealing with. Many of these critics can’t even point to Zimbabwe on a map and come from countries that have a worse conservation track record than most of Southern Africa.
Lets look at who is qualified to comment. Did you know that 23% of South Africa is under wildlife. Yes - that is an area the size of New Zealand or the whole UK under wildlife. Did you know that not a single National Park, Provincial reserve or private reserve in SA functions 100% on tourism alone and trade wildlife that inevitably ends up in the hunting industry.
Now lets look at Hwange reserve which is 12500 square km - lets compare that with Yellowstone which is 9000 square km. Hwange is part of a greater unfenced Transfrontier Park which attaches 5 countries to create a total area of 387 000 square kms where wildlife roams freely. That is the size of Germany, or Montana. In Montana they hunt legally over 500 mountain lions a year.
Why not take a look in your own back garden before trying to dictate to Africans how they should manage their wildlife for your benefit.

Under a predominantly “sustainable use” management plan the following has taken place in South Africa!
1953 total rhino 437—today +- 20 000 despite poaching. The catalyst in this success story is when sustainable hunting created a value for rhino, creating an automatic incentive to invest in rhino, create more space for rhino and ultimately protect rhino populations NOT INDIVIDUALS.
In 1967 estimated total wildlife population 1 to 1,5 million—-2012 estimate 23 million and counting. This is despite human encroachment, highways, disease, poaching, illegal trade and much more, and hunting is the foundation of this success story, NOT strict protection where wildlife is wrapped in cotton-wool to only have an aesthetic value, such as Kenya.
Started with under 800 wild lions, today estimated around 3200, the challenge is creating more space for them, which no doubt we will figure out here!
21,5 million hectares of private land which was once agricultural land, now converted to wildlife. Comparatively the State owns 7,5 million hectares of land set aside for wildlife—the private sectors huge expansion to wildlife did not happen by accident, it happened because wildlife is valued, revenue from wildlife eclipses that of conventional farming in these marginal agricultural areas, which is what most of southern Africa is.
Wildlife has its own economy, in some areas it is eco tourism, others it is hunting, some areas adopt both, wildlife can be eaten, the meat can be sold, products like skins are sold, game can be captured and sold to other reserves or protected areas or vice versa. There are many excellent examples of where wildlife is benefitting the lives of impoverished communities. The pioneers in the hunting industry (also passionate conservationists) are the people who began creating a value for wildlife, and it was wise & experienced conservationists, men and women in positions of authority within the various game departments who also played a monumental role in South Africa’s wildlife success story. How is that the 2 countries which have the fastest growing wildlife populations also host more hunters than the rest of Africa put together???? This is Namibia and South Africa.

Actually Suzanne, speaking as a Kenyan, who is deeply embedded in conservation as an intrinsic part of my culture, and having read the pure drivel that passes as fact that this article presents, it merely reiterates the arguments, stereotypes and quite frankly, racist thinking package as benign concern that justifies the stupidity of sports hunting—largely the preserve of insecure white American males. I am appalled at Mr Glen Martin’s chutzpah, the presumption that the African Mammals that are coveted by the blood-lusting types, just happened to pop up on the continent and survive by luck alone. He sites places and peoples, and then juxtaposes these with half facts. He was probably in Tsavo in the seventies. I am not sure he has met a single member of the Kenya Wildlife Services, who are made up, yes of the average African that he refers to so contemptuously. I hope that there shall be a vigorous rebuttal from assorted Africans who are on the ground, and in the midst of this who are disgusted by a culture that imagines that it is OK to travel miles to decimate our large mammals, the same culture that colluded in decimating their own through the centuries,

And of course the buffalo still run in the United States, and the wolves inhabit the mountains. Who the hell do you think you are to wag your finger at my people? Corruption? What do you call the economic crisis caused by your financial institutions. What hypocrisy. How dare you try to justify your murderous intent, you Anglo-Saxon nose-poking in the affairs of the animals that our people, I repeat, our African people, have preserved to this day. Where are your large mammals? The beneficiaries of the blood-letting (seriously, you guys need therapy to deal with that inclination) are mostly white owned ranch keepers on the continent. The list of those sited in Glen’s article are all part of those who have been lobbying for Sports Hunting in Kenya and have failed to date. Speaking for my generation of African, keepers of our legacy, inheritors of that which our ancestors through the wisdom of their culture sustained, keep away from us.

Actually dear, the greatest conservation failures in the history of the human race happened in Europe and the USA, and a good part of Australia and Canada when Europeans exported their blood lusts and proceeded to decimate species. Europeans with a mind set that turned other species into beasts and monsters, and hunted them to nothing, which attitude the same buggers have brought into my continent, Africa. Significant other conservation failure, China. Hyperbole has its place, and it is not here.

And indeed, the European slave traders, merchants and owners were merely caretakers of a problem, and were merely waiting for the right moment to craft a plan to save the Africans from their habits. Right! Such hypocrisy and revisionism is at the core of an evil, sociopathic, blood-lusting orientation that your culture actually quite frankly needs to deal with (I understand that Vatican has exorcists you might try). It is this unadulterated evil, and its excusing that lies at the heart of the decimation and devastation of our continent’s species. How does a sane mind twist itself into believing that life is preserved by its decimation for a man’s pleasure? Really? Your culture has already destroyed the species that existed in Europe, and proceeded to export the virus. Do not outsource your soul corruption, please. And try to keep away from my continent, Africa. Keep away from us and the species our cultures have preserved for our generations.

The most important factor for Wildlife in this day and age is Habitat - no habitat: no Wildlife. Photographic Tourism is filling what it can already (in terms of area / wildlife habitat) - that is economics - the whole of Africa (or anywhere else for that matter) can not be converted into a photographic area - if this was economic then this would already be happening. Land usage is always competing - whether this is farming, mining, photographic or whatever else.
Hunting areas (Conservancies, Concessions, Private Land e.t.c) make up a huge amount of Wildlife Habitat that would otherwise not exist - without these areas Wildlife numbers would plummet. If one can not make money from Wildlife then one turns to farming and whether this be cattle, crop, sheep, vegetable or whatever else there will be no wildlife left in that area!! People seem to forget that farming (whether meat or crop or vegetable e.t.c) has resulted in huge losses of Wildlife - areas that were once full with animals now empty. Even the ‘noble vegetarian’ can not escape from this impact! Land use has to be competitive - if you can’t make money from Wildlife you’ll switch to farming. Hunting is Conservation because it preserves and protects the Habitat which would otherwise not be there for Wildlife (the opposite would be farming). You may not like the act but cut out emotion and in the broader scheme of things hunting (legal) benefits wildlife - it is conservation. ‘Photgraphic’ fills what is can (and this does help - though one thing you can also bear in mind this that these places have far more environmental impact than hunting!) but hunting also plays a huge role in preserving Wildlife Habitat without which these species would not exist.

Dear Mark, you didn’t get the message. Please read again why Namibia is doing relatively well and why Kenia isn’t. Very little from the tourists money dribbles down to the local population while much more of it does in the case of trophy hunting and the other problem is that there seems to be no army or any other special field force in the world that can effectively fight poaching or stop it.

I’ve been reading these in my boring ass class and, right, there are pro hunting and anti hunting people but all of the facts that each side presents to one another is skewed in their way of interpretation. The basic facts that we can hold true to one another is that hunting is the oldest form of procuring food and it is not going to stop. It’s not bloodlust or for sport it is just how we are created people like meat and won’t be stopped from eating it. Personally though hunting is the closet thing to a “whole food” opposed to the slaughter houses that we get our everyday meat from. So which is worse, an animal who has time to thrive in the wilderness for a short time and then selectively chosen by a guide (who is trained to know an older animal from a younger animal and then selectively chooses which animal he is going to take from the herd) or a caged animal that is tortured for years or months of its life before being systematically terminated. Also another fact that is true about hunting in Africa is the amount of money that flows to all the people who are centered around it, which includes the larger cities with the bigger airports that can land transcontinental flights. The commerce that big game hunters bring to the African continent are huge. First getting to Africa costs money and typically these people stay in a bigger city for a few nights to get acclimated to the climate, time, and atmosphere of Africa. So on an economic standpoint, those few days they are contributing to the normal commerce of Africa. Then they go hunting and pay outrageous amounts to shoot a few animals which they may not even get to see and all that money goes to conservation of animals, guide fees, taxi drivers, hotels, airports, and all sorts of little economic niches that people are too afraid to talk about because those big game hunters are big spenders to say the least and money is money so why stop a trade that is so lucrative to everyone not just the big ranches. So not killing an animal in Africa contributes to the African Economy. Even though killing an animal can be gruesome would we want to allow people who are uneducated in hunting animals to just kill every single one they see? Or someone who is trained to spot the older more mature animal that isn’t going to contribute to the herd to have that one specific animal shot by their client? The world isn’t perfect and people aren’t perfect so mistakes will happen but raising money to give incentives to lesser corruption can be obtained if hunters and hunting activists can actually band together because they both want the same thing. The preservation of the habitat for future generations. So the sooner that people stop pointing fingers at one another and just face the fact that if you’re a human you have displaced animals through urbanization (like driving a car, living in a house, etc., you have contributed to the decline of animal population) and that every person is responsible for the slighting numbers of animals that used to roam the plains of all contents the sooner we can figure out how to get these populations more stabilized for a better future for our kids and let them share the same things that we have been fortunate enough to have in our childhood and lives.
Completely my opinion because I love animals and imagine the good that could come from if both Anti-hunters and hunters banded their purses together to help the same common goal monetarily. The outcomes could be infinite.

With all the natural threats to wild Africa, combined with poaching, hunting, and decease does Africa really believe they have a surplus enough animal population to continually kill for sport. If Africa’s wildlife habitat disappears the wildlife income of these countries will end and it will become a desert with even more severe crisis beyond animals. The ecosystem that sustains large animals in Africa is absolutely critical to its future. Saving the species is far more important to Africa than killing it for 200, 000 dollars a year with the prospect of nothing in the future. Get real, the numbers don’t add up for the animals or the countries.

Biased to trophy hunting for sure. Endangered species do exist even though the hunting community doesnot buy it. Africa needs a new philosophy on hunting. There are species to be hunted for meat and sport but they don’t include the endangered big 5, elephants, leopards, lions, hippo, and rhino. Protect the species not the trophy hunt. You are livin in the past/

Did you read anything? Ecotourism is only viable in a fraction of wild African areas. The whole point of this article is that people like you, who don’t understand this matter, need to keep your mouths shut.

Thoughtful and articulate article. As are some of the responses, even those anti-hunter/animal rights posters. However, to them I would add that the article only touches lightly on the fact that the meat from legally hunted animals both in Africa and here in North America is consumed by local people. So cry me a river… if you want to be a strict vegetarian please feel free but STFU about my choices. And if you dare be an omnivore please take your intellectual tripe and shove it up your hypocritical behind! Hunting and eating meat have been a fact of life since time immemorial and the traditions, ethics, economy, and economic truths around hunting and hunters’ conservation efforts trump your self sanctifying wrong headed whining. The anti-hunting crowd are like clouds, once they take off its a beautiful day!

Those of you who comment on “how to manage” Africa’s wildlife are surely clueless. Anti hunting advocates MUST rely on biologists, wildlife game managers and the people who deal with these problems everyday. Don’t you people realize that as mentioned the poaching weather for meat or the illegal trade of ivory/rhino horn is completely out of control. Without giving wildlife a value and that means an incentive to the pastoral /farmers we will loose certain species of wildlife. The propaganda that is put out by anti hunting organizations to have folks send money to them is for the most part biased. One need only to look at the results of controlled and regulated hunting in Namibia and South Africa to see the success story of regulated hunting. But the anti hunting establishment refuses to applaud those actions because it does not fit into there agenda. And there lies the problem, anti hunting organizations know nothing about wildlife management and conservation, they only need your money to pay for lobbying and their salaries. Think I m mistaken? , check there tax return records which are public record. You may be surprised to see just how much they give to wildlife and conservation. Sportsman are the only ones to promote wildlife and manage the resource. Weather you like it or not this is the truth. Emotion has NO place in serious and complicated matters such as this. And until anti hunting folks understand and accept hunting as a valuable management tool we will loose to the poachers and China and other countries who cannot get enough ivory and bone. Why we do not legalize ivory trade is beyond me. Does anyone realize the ivory that is confiscated is destroyed. Why not sell the ivory on the open market and use that money to further wildlife and conservation? Stop thinking with your hearts, for you understand Nothing of the problems some of Africa’s wildlife faces. In closing I am a hunter I have traveled worldwide. I hunt ethically and legally. If someone breaks the law while hunting he should face the harshest punishment allowed by law. I have seen the devastation that poachers inflict on uncontrolled areas. Get off you asses and go look for yourselves if you have the stomach. If not then accept what the professionals tell you on how to properly manage wildlife.

Norm - your very assumptions are part of the greater problem, complete lack of knowledge/facts and experience in wild Africa.
First off, the Big 5 does not include hippo - rather Cape buffalo, and neither the Lion, Leopard, Elephant or Buffalo are “endangered species”!!!! A simple look at CITES would tell you that.

No surprising that Namibia is managing its wildlife better than Kenya (and most other African countries) because like Botswana, Namibia has solid rules which are followed by the authorities and of course aren’t as corrupt. In short, it shows us which countries are economically well governed and whose natural resource profits are transparent and put back into society.

Ted, I imagine you are not Australian, if you were you would know we already have far too many feral cats in Australia which threaten our unique birds and marsupial species. No lions, thank you. And koalas are NOT BEARS!!

And who is going to pay for all these jobs? You? And you probably just zipped through the article. He actually speaks about the corruption in some African countries. Have you ever went to Africa yourself to see the situation? Or you’re just well-informed because of the National Geographic shows on TV? And the whole country got up in an uproar because an old lion had been shot in Africa while in America every day there are 25 veterans who commit suicide. But I guess veterans are not on decline like the other big game animals in Africa … Get your priorities straight, volunteer for a just cause and let’s solve the problems in our country before we jump to conclusion. I think the article is very well written and he has real good sources, too.

Australians are delusional. Cats that weigh 500 pounds and eat buffalo, pigs and camels won’t bother with Australia’s precious marsupials. They are not cane toads. They don’t produce 3,00o or so eggs at a go. Gimme a Bengal tiger any day and you keep the cockatoos.

Conrad. This article diminishes the value of life to wild animals and their characteristics. It also gives trophy hunters a reason to slaughter extinct animals. There is a balance of life on the earth that works automatically referred to as dynamic equalibrium. The earth has regulated itself long before man overpopulated the planet: 7.2 billion, to be exact. Other factors include deforestation, greed and corruption. We as the more “intelligent” species must learn to cohabitate. There are more humane ways to settle these issues rather than slaughtering animals.

How nonfactual can you get the lion according to the the people keeping an eye on him buy his tracker said he was at his prime for his age as well as having a mail partner that he co assisted with 2 prides with . These animals were in a protected park and the animal was lead out by the hunters by using food to do so this animal was an ambassador to the park and well know on tv as well. The hunter who lead the lion out of its protected area to be killed not leagly It was not causing problems or bothering the population . If Africans wish to change there lifestyle there own governments must be changed . The hunter from the US also after killing the lion and finding out he the lion was protected the US Hunter wanted to continue hunting another animal A lot of money is sent to these countries for forien aid as it is from other counties . We can not change there governments. That is up to the people of their own countries to find a way . 5these animals are dieing out year after year this hunter di d not help with any consevation at all in this case . The lion was a torest attraction and had been for years

Via ‘Project Muse’ one can purchase and read .pdf files of Aldo Leopold’s circa 1930s text well describing most of these issues. The Chapter “Game Economics” is the core of it. The rest of the text is classic, as well.
A recent article of Charles E. Kay, Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology in Utah repeats a lot of this article, reprinted by permission here:
http://www.rexano.org/ConservationPages/Kenya_Frame.htm
I have been in conversation with a hunter who once met a World Wildlife Fund economist, who was purchasing a pair of his skiis secondhand and noted that he indeed must hunt. He had just spent months in Africa and come to the very stark conclusion that hunting-tourism was essential to allow. Those willing and capable to travel to hunt have FAR less impact on the environment, do not require numbers of conveniences that typical tourists do, are accustomed to and undeterred by camping-type conditions, and indeed are willing to pay for their sport: and, also, *donate*. Unfortunately, this is not true of far too many outdoor enthusiasts. I know a former peace corp member who likes to lead photographic ‘safari’ to see animals (vs hunt) and from everything described, despite all parsimony, it’s really a very large impact. With improved technology I’m sure some of this could improve somewhat, but simply having large droves of people streaming through versus small parties of people leaving barely a trace: very different thing, and need be considered.

In the year 2050, we will have 11 billion people on the planet. The population of Africa itself is predicted to grow exponentially higher—more than quadruple of that of any other country. These animals will be long gone if not before then, certainly near that time. Look how the animal populations are being managed now, and how numbers are dwindling. There are 4 white Rhinos on the planet. It will only get worse with less land, less habitat, more demand for humans to take, spread out, to use, to rape the earth of it’s resources in an attempt to sustain more and more people. It will be a losing battle because there will be too many people, even less will care, corruption even worse, and the animal populations on the African continent as well as others will be wiped out—there is no doubt. So all this back and forth, this way and that, all the arguing or what we do today or what we don’t do, ultimately won’t matter much anyway. We can’t even agree now—the citizens of the earth surely won’t in 2050. I suspect some or maybe most of us will be gone by then, just replaced by many others. I guess we should revel in the fact that yes we had the amazing opportunity to live while the Lions, Elephants, Hippos, Zebras, Polar Bears and many many others were still alive. As we today wonder what it would be like to gaze at a Saber Tooth Tiger, so will the future generation wonder what it was like to gaze at a Lion. Mankind will use up all the resources. Then it will be Mankind’s turn to disappear due to it’s own shortsightedness, mismanagement, taking for granted what was here, and being bad stewards of the planet and it’s resources. I am heartbroken for Cecil, but at least I got the opportunity to feel passion for a Lion. Future generations won’t get the chance.

Lest we forget, the client, ie the plantation owners and the industrializing nations were the driving force behind slavery, and today, there is still an (un) healthy market for, among other things, sex slavery - in Europe.

ACACIA HONEY - very well said, the likes of the Ted Gorsline’s of this world can barely string 2 sentences together, notice he didn’t challenge any of the points you made, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, and the tool mostly used by bullies.

Proof is that absolute nonsense can fool people: this is a perfect example of how twisting facts & figures can actually make them say they opposite of what they are!! Congrats for the malicious syntax, YOU’VE ALSO PROVED YOUR READERSHIP’S STUPID!!

My law school, UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, CA will be having a legal debate on this subject matter on October 30, 2015. The title is “Hunting for answers about Sustainable Use Conservation.” All sides will be represented by experts on the subject matter - and - all sides will be respected. If you have been wondering about this issue, and the legalities of it, please google UC Hastings & Hunting for answers about Sustainable Use Conservation. As of today, 9/14/2015, the registration site is not up, but I’m hoping it will be soon. Space is limited.

Dear Amanda,
You are wasting your time and everybody else’s time. Better a conference to see how The head of the humane Society of the United States got a beach house in Malibu, How the former head of the IFAW got a $2.5 million payoff and a beach house in Miami. Also find out if there is still a warant for his arrest in Canada in regards to transferring his foundation’s helicopter into his own name, also find out how environmentalist turned real estate mogul, David Suzuki got five huge ocean front properties including one on Quadra island where bloggers say he keeps a Saddam Hussein type statue of himself. Then look into a major financier of Suzuki and the IFAW - billionaire Robert Schad - the retired king of the plastic injection moulding business (his machines produced 80 billion bottles a year in the USA alone) and his very strong link to the pollution all the world’s oceans, whales and seas bird with plastic bottles which at one time were recylable glass bottles. Do something useful with your conference unless of course you want a beach house for yourself.

Dear Amanda,
You are wasting your time and everybody else’s time. Better do a “beach house” conference to see how The head of the Humane Society of the United States got a beach house in Malibu, how the former head of the IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) Brian Davies, got a $2.5 million payoff and a beach house in Miami. Also find out if there is still a warrant for his arrest in Canada in regards to transferring his foundation’s helicopter into his own name (see Brian Vallee story -Toronto Star), also find out how environmentalist turned real estate mogul, David Suzuki got five huge front properties including at least one ocen front property on Quadra island where bloggers say he keeps a Saddam Hussein type statue of himself. Then look into a major financier of Suzuki and the IFAW - billionaire Robert Schad - the retired king of the plastic injection moulding business (his machines produced 80 billion bottles a year in the USA alone) and his very strong link to the pollution all the world’s oceans, whales and seas bird with plastic bottles which not long ago were recylable glass bottles. Do something useful with your conference, unless, of course, you want a beach house for yourself… and in that case discuss how to cash in (huge salaries and travel perks in not for profit organizations) with mail order animal rights beggar organizations. Keep the message simple. “We save. They kill”…. Paypal and planned giving on the right.

Dear Amanda,
American lawyers have a world wide reputation as bottom feeders who fleece anyone they can for whatever they own. You should take a close look at Robert Schad. He is the founder of Husky Injection Moulding which he sold to Gerry Schwartz for about a $billion dollars. He has money. Lots and lots of money. Maybe some of it should be yours?
Schwartz himself is an interesting duck. He got his business training wings from gangster Bernie Cornfield who as all Califonians will remember was the pimp for Heide Fleiss hooker to the Hollywood stars (and politicians).
Anyway Robert Schad took two green products - recyclable glass bottles and paper bags - and with his plastic injection moulding machines - obsoleted them and replaced them with filthy plastic bags, plastic bottles, and chemicals such as cadmium which in injected into the plastic makes the bottles shiny - and now these bottle have polluted ALL the oceans of the world.
Worse still Schad invented plastic bottles that disintegrate into small particles thus enabling them to enter the food chain at the lowest levels (as well as detroying the evidence of their existence).
Some U of C scientists have said this may lead to the extinction or all whales in all oceans of the word. I would think an environmentally minded lawyer, like yourself, might be able to conjure up a massive mutli trillion dollar suit against Mr Schad and stand a good chance of cashing in big time. Its worth a look.
Tally Ho!

Dear Amanda,
FYI. I found another animal rights activist beach House. You can’t be a proper animal rights activist unless you own a multi million $ dollar beach house or like Miley Cyrus and Pamela Anderson, make your own private B grade porno films that get leaked to the internet. Look up Lilli Schad.
She understandably doesn’t make porno films, but she is the daughter of plastic injection mogul and animal rights activist Robert Schad. She makes environmental films, such as one about banning cougar hunting in California, and she too has a beach house in California where she has a studio.
Then Google Anchorage Daily News three days ago to see the photo of the bear being strangled by the product of a plastic injection moulding machine. There are hundreds of such photos on the internet. I call plastic injection moulding machines - baby bear stranglers - but actually they are equal opportunity stranglers because they strangle every living thing.
This is a huge legal cash cow just waiting to be milked. 1) The cost of cleanup of plastic garbage, such as the Great Pacific garbage Patch, and not just in the Pacific but in all the world’s oceans - all traceable to one super rich man 2) The costs of removing toxic, whale killing, chemicals used in the plastic injection moulding business from all the world’s oceans - all traceable to one super man, 3) The need to remove 30 years of wild animal strangling devices from the whole earth - why they are worse than wire snares in Africa - and in this case all traceable to one super rich man with plenty of loot to spare for more beach houses.
Amanda this is a dream come true for you and others in the American legal profession. There are thousands of underemployed young lawyers in America in need of money and beach houses and there are $billions just sitting there waiting to be plucked. Start your engines men (and women).!

Just out of curiosity I looked up the link between animals rights activists and beach houses as they seem to be a kind of breeding ground for these sorts of people. Pamela Anderson has a beach house in Malibu. Myley Cyrus has one in Malibu and another in Miami Beach. Leonardo di Caprio has one in Malibu and Bridgett Bardo has on the Cote D’Azur. Her parents have one at St Tropez. Not sue yet but Al Gore may have broken the mould. I can only find his name linked to a body rub parlor in Washington State called “The Happy Ending.”

I hate to say it, because the link between seriously big money and animal rights activists suprises even me, but I looked up another high profile animal rights activist - Pierce Brosnan - and see he and at least two others have two or more beach houses.
Brosnan has one beach house in Malibu and another in Hawaii.
I now think God has a hand in this and is quietly shifting these people to the sea coasts of the world - so that when Al Gore’s global warming kicks in big time, God can melt the ice caps and drown the lot of them.

Dear Acacia Scummy, Jomo Kenyatta stopped sport hunting in Kenya in 1977 so his daughter Margaret could get on with her ivory poaching business. The white huters were all honorary game wardens, who put an end to the poaching, and they were throwing a wrench into the gears of her income. So Jomo pulled them out of the field. In 1960 you could drive from Nairobi to Tanzania and see 350,000 wild animals. Now you see 350,000 goats and the Masai are working hard to get rid of the last of the wild animals so they have more grass for their skinny cattle. I have had Masai ask me to kill as many grants gazelle as possible to leave the grass for their cattle. The Sikuma, another catle herding tribe, completely destroyed the Kilombero Valley in Tanzania by moving in 850,000 head of cattle in a period of about three years. I was there and watched them poison all the lions and the vultures too as collateral damage. In 1991 lions there were roaring from five different directions. By 2003 - dead silence- and no vultures to be seen anywhere. These are your indigenous conservationists. You are talking pure BS and you know it. The greatest conservation failure in the history of mankind has been Kenya under indigenous leadership, on the watch of the International Fund For Animal Welfare funded, by men like Robert Schad. Environmentalist Schad, with his promotion of plastic injection moulding machines has probably done more to pollute the earth and its oceans with plastic garbage than any human being who has ever lived - and he even has his own environmental foundation. I think of him as the “Angel of Death” for all the world’s oceans. I think he funded envronmentalists like David Suzuki and the IFAW to keep everybody’s eye off what he was really doing - controlled opposition so to speak. It just takes money and you are probably getting your share as you type.
I cannot help but wonder what is really going on in Kenya because the destruction of the wildlife has been so thorough that it must have been done on purpose. Maybe the idea is to clear the land of all stake holders of wild animals so Kenya can been converted into a GMO paradise where land is cheap and plentiful. Lake Naivasha is already surrounded by flower farms.

TED GORSLINE, You seem very intelligent, opinionated, and tend to do a lot of research on this topic. I cordially invite you to attend the symposium at UC Hastings, College of the Law, in San Francisco, CA on October 30, 2015. It’s free. You will hear from experts, who help to shape the law and policy as it relates to hunting, and hunting of endangered animals both nationally and internationally. All sides of this issue are represented. It’s a neutral platform for everyone. We, as society, need to understand all the facts before we can change the laws. Unintended consequences are always a bad thing, not matter the subject. So, bring your breadth of knowledge along. You know how to reach me. I’ve already reached out to you via e-mail. But, you did not respond. Given that you post here, practically every-day, I figured I’d reach-out again. Unfortunately, I will not be able to stay connected to you after today. As, I am too busy trying to organize this symposium and have opted to stop being contacted each time you post. I simply cannot stay on-top of all of your daily posts, no matter how much fun they are to read. All the best, Amanda.

Dear Amanda, I answered your e-mail from my yahoo account instantly giving you my phone number and the best times to get in touch with me as we live in much different time zones. Just send me the airline ticket and confirmation, hotel accomodation and food has been paid for. If you haven’t got the money ask Robert Schad to get it for you. He is a $billionaire and the world’s major cash cow for the anti-hunting movement. He can be found either in Toronto or Tel Aviv. Rumour has it that he is working on a major conservation project in Israel to protect Israel’s national bird - the vulture - which they feed on Palestinian children.

Dear Amanda,
A little tip for your conference. Get some former wildlife experts from Zimbabwe National Parks during the Ian Smith days. Too bad Clem Coetzee died. They ran Zimbabwe conservation perfectly. Don Heath is still alive. Get Conraad Vermaak from RSA. Conraad was at the birth of sport hunting promotion in South Africa and it is now by far Africa’s greatest (and completely unheralded) conservation victory. In 1960 there were only wild animals in the National Parks and none outside. They put a trophy fee on game animals and allowed ranchers to collect it. They now have more than 20 million big game animals of 35 species outside the national parks because the ranchers make more money having game on their property than cattle sheep and goats. Its a stunning endorsement of sport hunting wheras Kenya and India, both in the hands of animal rights activists, who have a co$y relationship with the ministers there are the greatest conservation failures in the the history of man kind.
Forget the NGO parasites from US universities. They are like flies on guess what. And then ask yourself what is the US Fish & Willdife Service, which I don’t believe has any mandate to spend the American tax payers money in Africa, doing in Africa. Maybe Oliver North could answer that question?
You say you are not going to read any more of these posts as you are busy bodying your life away but I know you will.

Dear Amanda,
Dear Amanda - some notes on financing your convention - The only way I am going to be able to raise enough money for airline tickets and accomodation is by collecting aluminum beer cans along the highway, and I haven’t got the time, or enough green garbage bags, to get the job done.
Just contact Robert Schad and tell him that you plan to do a hatchet job on me. I am sure he will readily send his private jet to pick me up and maybe even include dancing girls in the package.

Dear Amanda,
I did get your e-mail and I did reply to it. So I just went to look for it to send it to you again and now neither your original e-mail to me, which I saw, nor my reply to you, which I sent are in the computer?
I have had spy programs inserted (and then removed) from my computer three times. Sometimes stuff is pulled off the screen as you type. They usually originate from art galleries in New York (Israelis) but I cannot imagine why anyone would bother to take an interest in a wildlife conference.
So please send your e-mail again with your phone number and I will try the phone.

Dear Armanda,
I see we have now made contact. I ran out on the Audubon this morning , dodging eight lanes of traffic, to snatch up beer cans to get enough money to get a ticket to attend your conference but found it trickier than I had imagined.
There is no speed limit and the average car goes 200 km per hour, or seven times the speed of a black rhino. Dodging 3,500 vehicles an hour (same as the world’s total black rhino population) for a paltry average take of three beer cans an hour doesn’t pay.
In addition, the closer you get to Berlin the more drug addicts you have to compete with and because they tend to be slim, desperate, and great risk takers they are very fast. So it just hasn’t worked out.
So thanks for the invite, but I am afraid I must decline your offer, and wish you only the very best.

Dear Sheryl,
TGTS, the best safari company in Tanzania shoots 6 male lions a year on 43 lion hunts. Each hunt costs about $100 K so those six trophy lions bring in $4.3 million or about $750 K each which makes it worthwhile for the Tanzania government to set aside land for lions and not just land for cows.
A Masai cow is worth $40. I’ve bought them and even priced Masai wives which cost 4 cows for a run of the mill wife, and more for a chief’s daughter. The fact that a trophy lion can be worth $750 thousand dollars, and a cow $40 dollars, is why Tanzania, which has the largest lion population in Africa, has set aside space for lions.
The Selous Game Reserves, for example, since its inception has been nothing but one big hunting block and it holds 5,000 lions, the largest lion population in Africa - more lions than Serengetti.
Let’s face it. The animal rights business is just a collection of greasy criminals running mail order businesses designed to rook senile little old ladies out of their estates. A billionaire New Yorker named, I think, Leona Helmsly was recently surrounded on her death bed by a badgering animal rights vulture fest; all the usual suspects with pens in hand and inheritence contracts descended on her in her final hours.
Fortunately the courts stepped in and stopped them although one flock of animal rights vultures did make off with $100 K. They’ll need it. They just lost a $16 million suit to Ringling brothers Circus. They were caught fudging evidence.
In Kenya lions are protected and are now vermin so the $40 cows outvalue the vermin lions so the locals kill lions in bulk. I know a rancher on Lake Naivasha who tells me he has killed 250 vermin lions and he has a buddy who has shot 350 vermin lions. That’s 600 lions, worth a small fortune to Kenya, killed for nothing because trophy hunting is banned, and the cattle are worth more than the lions and that is why Kenya has lost 70% of its wildlife in the last 10 years, and why most of its re-introduced bongos come from a single sport hunting ranch in Texas. Wild animals have no value to the average Kenyan.
Incidentally there is a really stupid couple from Botswana, heavily promoted by the National Geographic Society, who tried to run a single photo safari block in the Selous and they fell flat on their face, but the 45 or so hunting blocks have always run tickety boo.
As for me. I am not like you. I like lion hunting and would have been happy to plug Cecil, who was unknown until this latest campaign, and put him in my trophy room, alongside Daffy, Donald, Bambi and Thumper.

Addenda, The six male lions TGTS shoots, all over six years old and no longer necessary for breeding, also supports a charter air craft service so the income from the hunts and the charter service has a significant multiplier effect for Tanzania - which has been lost in Kenya.
I think the greatest problem TGTS faces is that they will spend a fortune protecting a lion area for years and then some crook will come along, use bribery to take their areas away, and shoot all the trophy lions they have spent years nurturing.
On the postive side I see the National Geographic Society has been sold. Their credibilty has really gone down the drain in recent decades with the eco-hooligans they have supported and they really do need a shake up.

Its important that the NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, THE NRA, most of whose members are hunters, begin to take a closer look at Toronto $ Billionaire Robert Schad (net worth 1 $billion) who is the hidden financial hand behind the international anti-hunting movement, because with 5 million members (make that voters), the NRA has never had the slightest problem dealing with farsical multi billionaires like George Soros (net worth 5 $billion), Diane Feinstain (God only knows in military contracts for her various husbands), or Michael Bloomberg (net worth $14 billion) whom the NRA chews up and easily spits out like rotted plum seeds.

The NRA just humiliated Michael Bloomberg again in Virginia, where the candidate Bloomberg sponsered got tossed under the bus; and the Ontario government just re-opened the spring bear hunt which Robert Schad was instrumental in closing. Time to re-open the California cougar hunt which Schad’s daughter, via Clearwater films, helped to close and I don’t even think that she is American but rather Israeli or Canadian? The times they are a changing and it seems for the better.

Grizzly bears are expanding their range everywhere and killing people as they go. They are moving onto the great plains in Alberta, where the population has doubled, and Montana where an unknown poulation of about 800 grizzles was recently discovered by the US geological survey, moving south into Manitoba from the barrens. Their habitat is saturated in Alaska. There are so many black bears now that an attempt to re-introduce caribou into Maine failed because they bears killed all the calves - and animal rights nutters want to shut down the bear hunting. Really stupid. The greatest conservation problem the world faces today is the animal rights beggers with the BS conservation programs, written by ad agencies, and their begging hands out for $ money. If you want to save grizzly bears do something worthwhile like re-introducing the barrenland variety into Labrador and northern Quebec where they were extirpated by first nations stewards of the wilderness working for the fur trade. Lots of empty land up there and almost no people to bother.

Addenda, A few years ago the Canadian Wildife Service captured and tagged about 200 barren land grizzly bears in what was the NWT. These bears live by hunting caribou just like the ones in Labrador once did. Easy to just fly them across Hudson Bay and drop them off in Labrador and they don’t have to learn any new behaviour to survive.

Addenda, A few years ago the Canadian Wildife Service captured and tagged about 200 barren land grizzly bears in what was the NWT. These bears live by hunting caribou just like the ones in Labrador once did. Easy to just fly them across Hudson Bay and drop them off in Labrador and they don’t have to learn any new behaviour to survive.

Addenda,
As far as I know the only hold up to re-introducing grizzlies into Labrador is that the local stewards of the wilderness don’t want them back. They are highly predatory and dangerous. Having them around protected and habituted to people is like encouraging your kids to play in the traffic. However, if they could legally be killed when they come into a village and trophy hunted they are worth then worth 10K each to a village and when that kind of money comes into play the locals will protect them. Trophy hunting is a great wildlife conservation tool if the money get to the locals.

The ad agency, buzz word driven animal rights movement makes its money creating straw men to attack. Thus we get the “rich American trophy hunter”. The people behind the animal rights movement like Robert Schad and George Soros are multi $billionaires and all their puppet flunkies, like David Suzuki, are millionaire media personalities bristling with expensive beach houses. The pot is calling the kettle black.

It has been confirmed that the NRA has held its first ever meeting to take a look at the animal rights movement. This is a wonderfull thing. They have good lawyers and political connections and can play hardball as poor old loser Michael Bloomberg has discovered. He can no longer run for office in NYC. They cost him too much money. His mother must have been a dominatrix as he so much seems to enjoy self humiliation at the hands of the NRA. Another rag doll kicked under the bus.

The average number of grizzly bears killed in BC is about 350, which given the number of licences you mention is quite sporting. The vast majority of hunters are unsuccesful. There are about 26,000 grizzlies in BC, so many that they are now swimming to Vancouver Island where they have never been seen before; and with population growth pushing them out in the east and onto the plains of Alberta. They have even showed up in Calgary backyards. Alberta should re-open the grizzly season before more people get killed.

I read a very interesting artcle yesterday about the use of barb wire, bait and DNA to determine very accurately the grizzly populations.Wherever, the technique has been used, such as in Montana and Alberta, the bear populations have been found to be twice as high as the former game department etimates. It makes you wonder if there are not really 52,000 grizzlies in BC and 64,000 in Alaska. No proof of this so far but it would be worth finding out. The bags limits could be raised substantially,in places like the Great Bear Rain Forest, and the length of the hunting seasons also increased. Young first nations stewards of the wilderness would once again have the chance to guide clients to as many as 300 grizzly bears each just like the famous BC first nations, elder, steward of the wilderness, roll model - Clayton Mack.

I see where Bridgett Bardot’s campaign to stop the import of lion skins into France has succeeded. Her next two projects are stopping a feral cat cull in Australia to help wipe out song birds there, and according to hareetz.com stopping Jews from slashing the throats of the innocent (not Palestinians but rather lambs) to stop what Hareetz says she calls “ritual sacrifice”or really the throat slashing of unstunned and captive animals to produce coiture meat.

For anyone working on a postgraduate degree in the study of B-lls—t I recommend you read an old book called “In the Wake of the War Canoes”. Its the missionary recollections of BC coastal Indian values and traditions in the days before ad agencies dreamed up the animal rights movement as a way of separating little old ladies, suffering from dementia (cat ladies), from their cash. The writer documents the stewards of the wilderness kill of bears there, a century ago, as being 2,000 black and grizzly bears per year in the Nass River Valley. Bear worship is 20,000 years old, the oldest religion in the world, and no doubt this massive steward of the wilderness slaughter was done in the name of God. Most things are; “In God We Trust (but maybe not the federal reserve)”, God’s chosen people”, and “Gott mit uns” on the belt buckles of Nazi soldiers.

Here is a great political football for the animal rights people, and sacred cows like Richard Leakey and the National Geographis Society to cash in on. South Africa has just legalized the sale of rhino horn. Rattle out a press release and find a camera boys. “There’s plenty of gold so I’ve been told in the hills of Hlue Hlue.”

I did a bit of googling around and must say I really wonder why wildlife conservation in Kenya, on the watch of men like Richard Leakey (who now works for the world bank), and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, (supported by billionaire Robert Shad), has become the single greatest wildlife conservation failure in the history of mankind.
It looks like Kenya has been converted into a paradise for endless numbers of NGOs and has become one big petting zoo. The Kenya Wildife Service even has a animal rehab center and has had to make a special reserve to save impalas which are as common as dirt everywhere else in southern Africa.
Presstitutes have given Kenya endless positive lamestream media publicity by burning heaps of elephant tusks at least twice on Leakey’s watch ( I am told but cannot confirm that to facilitate this charade that Kenya gets paid for the tusks under the table).
And according to one report the photo safari lodges contribute nothing to local communities but just milk Kenya blind and encourage reservoirs of vermin that harass poor farmers..
The country has gotten endless positive publicity from the National Geographic Society, (which seems to be an arm of the US state department) and from an infestation of cocktail party conservationsist and film makers who once crowded the shores of Lake Naivasha (Many like Des Bartlett saw the writing on the wall and moved years ago to hunter friendly Nambia) but more than any other nation on earth Kenya evolved, almost overnight, from being the best wildlife detination in Africa into the continent’s foremost wildlife conservation basket case.

I see where gangster Jimmy Hoffa’s old buddy Maurice Strong, the UN’s father of Global warming, has died but there is no mention of where or how he died. Give the company he kept my guess is that he was dragged out of his limousine and kicked to death in some ally.

Rumour has it that Maurice Strong, father of global warming, will be buried alongside his bosom buddy, Jimmy Hoffa, for whom he invested alot of money, in the foundation of a Chicago apartment building. The only hold up so far as been digging out the underground parking lot so the body can be lowered down and into place in as dignified a manner as is possible under the circumstances.

I see where a Mr Kent of Ambercrombie and Kent has picked up the anti-hunting baton. Oddly enough, by accident, I attended an almost Victorian ceremoney, in the sense of its patronizing attitude, at an Ambercrombie and Kent camp on edge of the Ngorongoro crater. A very out of place looking blonde woman, with a plummy accent, was handing out silly awards to a sullen looking African crew whom I am sure just wanted more money. I could not help but think she and her kind ought to leave Africa before they end up like Joan Root and Joy Adamson. Jane Goodall was wise enough to leave before her child killing Chimp - Frodo - killed her.

PS,
I forgot to mention another cocktail party conservationist, and casualty, in the form of Louis Leakey’s ex-lover Diana Fossey (Jane Goodall said she didn’t succumb to Louis because Leakey had bad breath and worse teeth and Jane knew a nice guy named Dimitri), who ended up at the wrong end of a panga defending her gorilla petting zoo.
These ranting, murdered and delusional white women all focus their empty tirades on “poachers”(poor people) and “bush meat”(the only food poor people have to eat) and in the process of selling their books (usually through Kent ‘s publisher Collins) they are invariably linked to mainstream (and often faked) wildlife photography organizations like the National Geographic Society. TV promotion helps sell books
You would think the photo safari people like Mr Kent would realize that they have no solutions to wildlife conservation in East Africa but rather they are the problem because the money they take in does not trickle down except in very token amounts. A patronizing award for “tent boy” of the month does not feed a family. A dead poached Zebra does.
The photo safari lodges are all take and no give and, and they have no solutions to any wildlife conservation problems and they never have had any. In fact the places linked the Ambercrombie and Kent lodges may well be the main reason Kenya is dying as a wildlife viewing destination.
Time to start pulling the photo safari lodges out of the National Parks. There is no need for the huge and disruptive road systems already in the parks, that burn up needed wildlife habitat, and are used to support these abominations on the natural landscape.

Addenda,
Africans like working for hunting safari camps because after the clients eat two or three kilos of a trophy buffalo, the rest of the meat is smoked and wrapped and the staff send it home for their families. What some Park staff are now doing in photo safari areas (Mikumi Springs is a good example)is using the donated anti-poaching Toyotas to drive lions off their kills and taking the meat from the lions who themselves must then kill again to survive. The prey animals in the photo safaris areas killed regardless, whether by lion or bullet, except that now the government doesn’t get a trophy fee for the killed beast to support wildlife conservation. When photo safari companies take over both the indigenous local people and the government (which has almost no tax base) get rooked out of money and food. The photo safari operators take in the ir money overseas and keep it there. They cash in big time and defend their offensive projects with mainstream media platitudes.
Jane Goodall for example takes in at least $16 Million per year and much of that goes to support her 150 chimps at Gombe. That amounts to an expense of $50,000 per chimp per year. With that kind of cash flow each chimp could buy himself a beach house at Malibu. The average African man (and really that means a family) living around Gombe makes about $300 per year. You can see why preachy white women get themselves killed.

Addenda,
The reason the photo safari companies don’t pull their own weight is because they are located within National Parks where the Africans, (who have lived there for 1.5 million years), have been pushed off the land. Since there are no people in the parks the photo safari companies don’t pay to build schools etc. like the hunting safari companies have always done outside the parks.
Photo safari companies operate on the same disenfranchising basis as Kahama mines in Tanzania where Nate Rothschild and Peter Monk pushed 44,000 local people off their gold claims (that had been left to them left to them by their father’s hands) and rehired a paltry few. Local reports say at leat 20 were shot trying to return to their family gold claims. So I suppose the people who have lived there now for 1.5 million years are considered to be gold poachers as far as the Rothchild and Monk families (who have never lived there at any time) are concerned and who are now pocketing all the gold.
As Jews, allegedly concerned about returning to a promised land, where they are rumoured to have lived 5,000 years ago (The Rothschilds financed the creation of Israel) you would think Monk and Nate Rothschild (who doesn’t look semetic) would be more sensitive to the concerns of the Africans who have lived on their land for 1.5 million years which the Leakey family has proven by finding old bones.
The fact is the photo safari companies, extract money from Africa, just like mining companies do, and they should all be pulled out of all the national parks. The huge road networks they have already built in the parks have destroyed thousands of square kilometers of grassland that should be rehabilitated, as is sometimes done with old mining roads.
In addition, the photo safaris lodges should be forced by law to be located right in the middle of African villages. That is the only way you will ever get them to pay their keep to upgrade the villages surrounding the parks they profit from, but which are a burden to locals because they are holding bins for vermin like the lions that eat their cattle..

I googled Geoffrey Kent and was suprised to see he doesn’t like bobbing around on yatchs and so may not like beach houses. He prefers travelling in his company’s 757-200 jetliner with the custom walnut interior, and wearing a Master compressor cronograph watch in rose and gold “plus keeping a Brequet and two or three Cartiers”in reserve.
He drives a very expensive Bently Arnage T. Mulliner and likes to ride polo ponies, which also gets expensive, and he likes homes designed by Zaha Hadid but so far no beach houses that I can see although I have been wrong before. Rubs shoulders with alot of high profile personalities such as movie stars.
These animal rights activists all seem to be incredibly rich. They make poor old Dr Palmer , the man who shot Cecil, look like a pauper.
No doubt about it. Kent is a certified success. He has profited very well for himself photographing Kenya’s game herds, in the parks, as they vanish, certainly much better than all of the villagers put together (who have been living where the parks are located, for the past 1.5 million years) and who to this day go to sleep at night worrying about lions running off with their children.

Thank you Suzanne,
Please share this and try to get others to understand what is really happening all over Africa. It is truly only hunting that actually supports the conservation of our wildlife heritage - without hunting there will be nothing left for our children to see within a few years.
The anti hunting organisations give nothing towards conservation - they only enrich themselves with the donations they receive from millions of sadly ignorant people who heed their call… John

Eco-tourism simply does not work. It does not give locals enough incentives to protect wildlife, the hunting industry on the other hand relies on a sustainable wildlife population and provides enough incentives to reach that goal. It is no accident that the only two places on the planet who have had increases in wildlife populations (North America and Southern Africa) over the last century rely on hunting revenue to fund conservation. I know people, especially those who spend their life in urban areas are effect emotionally when they see an individual animal killed, but I would encourage you to consider the bigger picture and the survival of the species as a whole.

Google “earth rangers” . Its a foundation started by billionaire Robert Schad, often the money bags behind anti-hunting David Suzuki and the anti-hunting International Fund for Animal Welfare on whose watch Kenya has been utterly destroyed.
The BBC said recently that 70% of the large animals in the Masai Mara Game Reserve, the jewel in Kenya’s wildife crown, have vanished in the last ten years or since about 2005.
Robert Schad is old and now it seems the Toronto based Schad or “Earth Rangers” foundation is run by his California based daughter Lilli. Legally Canada seems to be a great place for foundations. They sprout up everywhere providing full time jobs for many otherwise unemployable people.
I was once told there are 10,000 foundations in Canada for a small population of 35 million and the same 10,000 in the USA for a large population of 350 million although those figures are from more than 10 years ago. Not sure of the accuracy now but Canada is obviously a gung ho place to set up a foundation..
I look at the Schad website every few years to watch it evolve. They understand damage control and respond instantly to criticism.
At one time they seemked to be asking kids to turn in their parents if they caught them using too much electricity. Then they switched to conservation programs, one of which was to save Ontario badgers, and they posted a picture of a European badger. None of their many “experts” could tell a European badger from a North American badger. I criticized this and now the program seems to have folded or maybe I just didn’t google hard enough to find it.
Now the emphasis seems to be to get very, very, very young children, really young children, to start little projects designed to raise money to give to the Schad’s “Earth Ranger’s foundation and remember - The Schads are billionaires.
The family must have salted away big money back in Germany, in their banking days, because Robert Schad came to Canada in his early 20’s about, 1954 so, and he must have been of Hitler youth age when he lived in Germany, and he is a Jew, so if any of the stories Hollywood tells us about Nazis are true he had to have saved his bacon with big money or else collaborated with the Nazis like George Soros says he did? Schad has never explained this part of his life to anyone.
Toronto’s Eichmann family knew Admiral Canaris, head of German intelligence and they not only survived but thrived in Nazi times so maybe the Schad family had good enough contacts too to avoid the heat?
However, MSM cover stories tell us Schad was penniless when he arrived in Canada and got his engineering start by inventing a snowmobile that didn’t work. He must have been a good talker because can you imagine going into a bank to ask for money for a plastic injection moulding machine, when your only collateral for a loan, is a snowmobile that doesn’t work.
Robert Schad sold his company, Husky Injection Moulding to Gerry Schwarz who in turn sold it to a teachers union. The Schads got a $ billion dollars for Husky Injection Moulding, and even so they want tiny, penniless, little kids to work for nothing and send money to their foundation?
I find that cheap and tacky.
The idea of billionaires conditioning tiny little children, not old enough yet to reason, to work for them for nothing and having them send cash to the Shad’s “Earth Rangers Foundation” seems improper.
From there I assume the cash, from the alleged membership of 250,000 tiny little children, flows to people like David Suzuki and the IFAW.
To me “Earth Rangers” smells more like child slavery than a conservation program.

Correction, “Earth Rangers is a website designed for extremely young children and they are asking for donations but they do not specify that children send them the money for the projecrts they encourage so its not child slavery.
These kids are so young that they can’t have any money and would raise very little with their projects. So I assume the Schad’s are hoping their parents will ante up but its not child slavery as I said. It is mainly an attempt to condition thousands of very young children to think like the Schad’s think.

The more I look at the “earth ranger’s” web site the stranger it seems. Its very definitely targeting kids of kindergarten age, who don’t have any money, and who likely can’t even tie up their shoe laces, and who are still wetting their pants - and yet the pages with the kids programs on it are very definitely asking for donations - for money! The kids can’t be the financial target and no adult would ever read the childrens programs pages. Very curious indeed.

Correction to Correction: The “Earth Ranger Foundation” really is asking little kids to raise money for them. Sorry if I was so incredulous that I could not believe it myself. My very worst suspicions were a gross underestimate of what is really going on.
Go to the foundation page and then go to the “save the Wolverine page”. Follow it through. I just finished making copies of it. Look at the media “all” rights contracts for promotion.
If any of these penniless little kids (average age 6 to 9) raises $300 for the $Billionaire Robert and Lilli Schad owned “Earth Rangers Foundation” they get in return 1) Four buttons - value maybe $1.50, 2) a Lynx clinch bag - value maybe $5.oo, 3)An official T-shirt - value maybe $3.00, 4) A trophy dedicated to yourself - value maybe - 3.00.
In return for sending $300 ($300 dollars) to an anti hunting (not for profit) foundation owned by $billionaires Robert and Lilly Schad, kindergarten age children get (if they are lucky) goodies with a total value of $12.50 (twelve dollars ands fifty cents). Not a bad profit from a kid whose age (6 to 9) would qualify him or her as a child slave. No wonder the Schad family are $billionaires.
CNN is doing a child slavery series right now. They should get right on this story. Its in your face, on the internet, and simply unbelieveable and the money it raises lies right at the heart and soul of the international anti-hunting movement.
It begs the question - is money rooked from innocent, bed wetting, kindergarten aged children being used to support policies leading to the total destruction of all the last great game fields of Kenya?

Addenda,
There is obviously more money to be made rooking bed wetting aged white children out of their education money (and thus their futures) via foundations, than there is to be had swindling poor black kids out of the paltry sums they get for digging up blood diamonds in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

AHM - an excellent magazine ! but although I respect the paper on its purpose and objectives I still believe that hunting of apex predators should be a no go zone ; ages of 6 years or 8 years also dont make that much difference ; once taken it is a huge loss for the pride and all sort of things can take place eg destabilise the pride ; new take over ; potential infanticide etc ; rather concentrate in hunting antelope and buff for example ; yes hunt in areas where wild lions roam ; and yes that will contribute to less poaching ; the mere presence of hunters and cha ‘s will deter poaching ; but one as a hunter should not be a further contributor to the take off of male /female wild lions in africa ; as a meat (dedicated) hunter that is my take on the matter .

In Zimbabwe we ethical hunters never hunt from prides for this very reason - we only take older animals that have already done their time with prides and have been pushed out by other males. The infanticide in the pride has already happened naturally and has not been caused by hunting. There are also nomadic males that never get to take over a pride and we target the older ones from these nomads as well. It is not difficult to identify a pride male, even if he is not with the pride at the time, as pride males continually mark their territory (which nomads do not), and their back legs are stained by the urine they spray. So we never target pride males and thus never disrupt the prides.
In the conservancy where I work we are the custodians of over 200 Black Rhino that belong to the government. This population is categorised by the International Rhino Trust as ‘KEY ONE’ which means it is vital for the overall survival of the species. So far it is only hunters who have contributed towards our Rhino anti poaching costs which amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually…

Hunting is merely harvesting, like farming animals. It can be done without damaging conservation of the species population: it only needs to be controlled. That is hardly controversial. Really the objection is to hunting, the activity. And that is fashionable and facile.

I talked to Dr. Seige, from the GTZ when he was in Tanzania and he said the densest population of lions in all of Africa is in the NE Selous. I am not sure which blocks he meant but I know Luke Samaras has four blocks there and I have visited them and lions are very common. Until very recently, and maybe even today the Phs just looked for lions with good manes, regardless of their age. The six year rule did not apply for many decades and yet the blocks have a greater lion density that protected Serengetti National Park. Why that? Is the six year figure just more junk science? Too bad Don Heath just died. He would know.

Interesting facts ! in any case I would not bother to shoot at a lion and personally have no interest whatsoever to hunt one ; seen them on foot (actually tracked them on foot) in the knp here in SA and in kafue in zambia ;value them a lot but would never bother to waste money and time trying to take one out by sitting in a blind waiting to blast the animal when he feeds ; for me that is not hunting ; besides i eat eg kudu or impala of buff not lion sirloin! that is my take on the issue; but the fact of the matter is and I know that , kenya stop hunting and now its wild life is depleting ….; cha and hunting a firm deterrant for poaching and big plus for conservation but personally messing with apex predators is no go !

Hunting in a lion blind, especially when you sleep in the blind, hoping to catch a lion at first light can get more exciting than I require, and especially so if pride of many lions finds the blind in the dark of the moon and decides to disassemble it. It is also disconcerting to fall asleep and awake to the screaming of a herd of cow elephants that have accidentally surrounded the blind (or are feeding on it) in the dark and that have suddenly gotten your scent. I always tied the corners of the blind with light rope instead of wire, and carried a heavy knife, so I could slash the rope in any one of four directions, depending on where the eles were coming from, and go racing off into the night hoping there was nothing out in front of me to bump into.

very interesting comments ; anyway all reflect our personal believes , likes and dislikes ; i have been hunting since the age of 11? 12 ? with air guns , .22 , cal .20 ; .12 gauge ; 3006 ;.375 ; …but important for my development was how i saw some of the shangaan in gaza - mozambique hunt ; with a “zagaia” ;that is bow and arrow ; they would try and get wild rabbits !!! they are very good trackers ; so walk and stalk or ambush is probably the way i got used to hunt ;….yes agree it can be nerving if sitting in a blind ; camoing on the ground in places like moremi , savuti , zambezi valley ; kafue and mabuaseube ( me , my wife and mu son ) we have had ellies all around ; you can hear their stomachs rumble or lion ,hyena and leopard next to the tent…. ; but got a off road caravan last year and it should ease the night sleep from now on ….!

I found the best defence against herds of eles, if you heard them coming from a distance, and didn’t wake up amongst them (because neither they nor you knew where a blind would be set up), was dance music from Zaire. All the fisherman where I was had battery radios and they preferred dance music from Zaire to anything else. They played it all night long and were always moving their camps around. The eles learned this and didn’t want any trouble, so if you had your radio set at the right channel or had a cassett player ready all you had to do was turn it on and they would stop, shuffle around and then veer away.

You don’t say that hunting cannot be done in a sustainable way. Calling “sports hunting” ” stupid” is hardly a contribution to the debate. It reveals a prejudice, that is all. There is no culture in human history that does not have a special place for hunting; and I mean hunting not for food. Look at the native African people in their leopard skins and the like. When you day “speaking as Kenyan, who is deeply embedded in conservation as an intrinsic part of my culture” you are really identifying yourself as someone who accepts the misanthropic, intellectually bereft, recent, western fashion that is called environmentalism. That has nothing to do with reality let alone human nature , wildlife or Africa.

There is an excellent film on the value of lion hunting in Tanzania called Custodians of Wilderness: Tanzania but if you goolge it there are too many other similar sites to make it easy the find. However, you can get it at HTTPS://vimeo.com/user 17366897…150786530/efddf26820
Watch it and then go to Robert Schad’s website “earth rangers ” where this billionaire asks kids of bed wetting age (6 to 9) to raise money for his foundation in return for trinkets.
It will become absolute clear who knowsexactly what they are talking about and who does not. It will also become absolutely clear who is on the ground and taking action; and who is engaged in an MK-Ultra style mind control experiment.

This article is not nonsense at all - far from it. You claim that photographic tourism is profitable. For whom? Certainly not the habitats of wildlife, and ultimately not for wildlife. The reason is simple. The photographic safari industry is capital intensive, hunting is labour intensive. Their carbon footprint is vast compared to hunting safaris. The primary beneficiaries of photo safaris are the corporations that invest capital in lodges, roads, airports, aircraft, vehicles etc. Environmental damage by safari vehicles is a significant but hidden cost to the wildlife habitat - you should see for yourself. Hunting, on the other hand, does not require fancy lodges or roads, and has a far smaller impact on the environment. Anyone in this business will tell you that photographic tourism does not pay the environmental bills, whereas hunting does. Plus it provides significant benefits to communities on whose land hunting often takes place. Do the research buddy.

@ Julian,
What you say is true. I worked at the Nazinga Game Ranch in Burkina Faso for about two years and after I left an economist from a University in Quebec (forget which one) did an economic report about the place. I have not seen it but was told his recommendation was to get rid of the photo safaris entirely and just having hunting safaris. I am not sure of the reason but it may have been the high cost of road maintenance and low income from photo safaris.
George Frame who worked there for 15 years and now works for the US F&W Service may have a copy or know about it or where to get a copy. Clark Lungren, who created Nazinga is still in Burkina Faso and he would know as well. Both Clark Lundgren and George Frame were hands on involved in intergrating local people into the ranch as that was Clark’s original idea.
Photo safaris in Kenya operate basically like mining companies.
The people who had African wildlife Conservation down pat were the Rhodesians under Ian Smith. Flexibility is probably the key and they intergrated both photo and hunting safaris very well. Even today under Mugabe, Zimbabwe has about 70,000 eles but only room for about 30,000. Botswana also has too many eles too, more than 100,000.
From what I can see the animal rights people are basically nothing more than money grubbbing psychopaths. They are definitely pathological liars.

@ Julian,
What you say is true. I worked at the Nazinga Game Ranch in Burkina Faso for about two years and after I left an economist from a University in Quebec (forget which one) did an economic report about the place. I have not seen it but was told his recommendation was to get rid of the photo safaris entirely and just having hunting safaris. I am not sure of the reason but it may have been the high cost of road maintenance and low income from photo safaris.
George Frame who worked there for 15 years and now works for the US F&W Service may have a copy or know about it or where to get a copy. Clark Lungren, who created Nazinga is still in Burkina Faso and he would know as well. Both Clark Lundgren and George Frame were hands on involved in intergrating local people into the ranch as that was Clark’s original idea.
Photo safaris in Kenya operate basically like mining companies.
The people who had African wildlife Conservation down pat were the Rhodesians under Ian Smith. Flexibility is probably the key and they intergrated both photo and hunting safaris very well. Even today under Mugabe, Zimbabwe has about 70,000 eles but only room for about 30,000. Botswana also has too many eles too, more than 100,000.
From what I can see the animal rights people are basically nothing more than money grubbbing psychopaths. They are definitely pathological liars.

addenda,
The problem with the Nazinga Game Ranch is that it was a joint venture between a private foundation and the government. The idea was to sell meat, have game capture, have photo safaris and have hunting safaris. I booked and took all the original hunting safaris and in its very first season as a hunting safari company the ranch, for the first time ever, in 20 years, made a profit. That attracted the attention of the government and they took it over so I left. I am not sure what has happened there since but I believe it is now a pure hunting block and the anti-poaching patrols continue with the result that there is an expanding heard of about 500 elephants there which have never been hunted.
If there was no sport hunting for buffalo and roan at Nazinga there there would be no elephants at all because almost adjacent to Nazinga is what was called Po National Park (the name has been changed) and it was a completely protected photo safari area and when I was there, there, is nothing in Po National Park except cattle sheep and goats.
Photo safari clients are like visitors to a whore house. They want instant gratification. Check off the lion, then check off the ele, drive to the giraffe, and do this all day long all day long. Po is a big thorny thicket and even if Eles were there, you wouldn’t see them so it fell flat on its face as a photo tourism destination. But with a few water holes, and an anti-poaching squad from Nazinga it would fill up with eles in a hurry and make many great hunting blocks. Anti poaching is easy in the sahel. Just pick up a track and run them down with a dirt bike. The country is dry and fairly flat.

It does not matter where you go in Africa, lions are poisoned off by indigenous cattle herders but white people sell them the poison. At Nazinga in west Africa we had 5 lions that were protected. We were hoping they would set up shop within the ranch (roughly 36X24KM) and increase but unfortunately they would leave, eat cattle and I hear they have now all been poisoned off. Same in Uganda. I was there when 3 lions from Tanzania tried to re-establish themselves at Lake Kachera. They were all poisoned off and very quickly. Same in the Kilombero Valley. I was there in 2001 when lions were common and in 2003 after they had all been poisoned off. There are still a few there, especially at the west end of the valley, where there are tetse flies which the cattler herders avoid and some will come out of the Selous at the east end of the valley. Lions have great value as trophies but if the law turns them into vermin they are immediately exterminated from one end of Africa to the other by indigenous cattle herders who don’t just kill old, non breeding males. They poison whole prides. There are now only 2,000 lions in Kenya and they too are being poisoned. Stopping the export of the kinds of commercially available poisons that the cattle herders use to kill lions might slow things down although they will keep using snares, guns and spears. But if the lion is worth 30K to 100K to a village, and a cow is worth $40. they will think twice about killing lions. And if the lions are hunted and either get nervous about approaching people and/or the particluar cattle killers are removed, it helps too.
Good idea to plunk some desert lions into the Gibson desert in Australia and let them eat camels instead of culling 60,000 camels at a time. I hear but cannot confirm that if they get to drink blood they don’t need water. I have been to both the Gibson desert and to the arid land along the southern border of Mali where some cattle herders told me there are still a few lions around eating livestock in places where the Fulani people are so poor they cannot afford to buy poison so maybe its true.
Remember it was poison, introduced about 1850, that wiped out the California grizzly bear and not the mainly Spanish vaqueors who roped them for sport.

Eco tourism in the Masai Mara, which is ideal for eco tourism because it is wide open, so you can get your drivers to call their buddies on the handy and drive from a lion to an ele to a leopard in one afternoon (and I have done this on a photo safaris in the Masai Mara), has led to a 70% drop in wildlife in ten years. Obviously the photo safaris do not bring in enough money and Kenya does not work. Wildlife conservation in Kenya is a complete and disastrous failure of the human will.
The two greatest wildife conservation successes in all of Africa are the unheralded private ranches in South Africa and the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania and both specifically because of trophy hunting and as you say the money it brings in.
For example, in RSA, the law was changed to allow private ranchers to charge a trophy fee on wild animals on their property, the idea being to make wild animals more valuable than cattle sheep and goats. trophy hunters only take the ehadskins and horns. The meat stays in Africa and ends up in the bellies of Africans. Eco safaris just bring Africans a big head ache.
In 1960 there were few wild animals on private land and at one time only 11 white rhinos. I did not know Norman Deane who was at Hluhlue when the rhinos were in very low numbers but I knew his son Rob very well and he showed me around Hluhlue.
The hunting trophy fees, the money as you say, that created the incentive for ranchers to allow wild game to live on their land because the wild animals became worth more than the domestic aniamls. Despite the poaching there are now 20,000 white rhinos in RSA and 20 million other wild animals of 35 species on private land where in 1960 there were none. That is incredible success and as you say money made it happen. Compare that to the complete failures that are Kenya and India.
I was in Isiro in DRC in 2005 (doing a game survey 8on the Bomakandi River - not in Garamba) and at that time there were only 15 northern white rhinos left. They had been protected and reserved for eco tourism in Garamba park since 1934 and I believe Winston Churchill shot the last legal white rhino in 1934. Now, in 2016, they are extinct in the wild. Bravo for setting aside National Parks for eco tourism.
It is also money that makes lion conservation work, and money from hunting that makes the Selous Game Reserve work. The Selous has the largest populations of lion, buffalo, leopard and until recently elephant in Africa. Rolf Baldhus has just stopped the elephant poaching in the Selous although not yet in Rungwa.
Kenya which has gone the eco tourism route since 1977, has steadily declined and is now the classic example of the greatest wildlife conservation failure in the history of mankind. Kenya is a basket case. They only thing they know how to do is PR work, burning tusks to sell books and TV shows. Wildlife conservation just isn’t Kenya’s bag.
Another example, In the 1930,s there were about 30,000 eles in Zimbabwe. Now there are 70,000 which is too many but with Clem Coetsee gone, and only he could move or cull whole herds of elephants, nobody seems to know what to do about it. In the course of increasing the ele pop from 30,000 to 70,000 about 500,000 eles were shot and what happens when they are shot is a whole village gets fed and because of that don’t mind having the eles around.
Botswana closed hunting two years ago and is already starting to follow Kenya down the drain. Too bad.

Amusing to see all the dots being connected on this latest Kenya tusk burning festival. It includes the NRA’s two favorite punching bags - George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, and neither are looking too good these days. Thanks heaven for small mercies.
Then there’s Angela Jolie, the poster girl for missing body parts, allegedly hooking up to make a film wirth Richard Leakey’s perhaps about his growing up in a dysfuntional family with a drunken mother and philandering father?
Then there is Leonardo Di Crapio so named because the last two TV bear whisperers he backed rapidly made the transformation into bear crap.
An ugly rumour has it that a grooming Richard Leakey went into his bathroom only to find the mirror was broken, panicked , and then tried looking into the toilet bowl to see if he could see his reflection in the water, just like the original Narcissus, only to find the light bulb was dead leading to an attack of Post Dramatic Stress disorder.
God help us! Where do they dig these people up?

Amusing to see all the dots being connected on this latest Kenya tusk burning festival. It includes the NRA’s two favorite punching bags - George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, and neither are looking too good these days. Thanks heaven for small mercies.
Then there’s Angela Jolie, the poster girl for missing body parts, allegedly hooking up to make a film wirth Richard Leakey’s perhaps about his growing up in a dysfuntional family with a drunken mother and philandering father?
Then there is Leonardo Di Crapio so named because the last two TV bear whisperers he backed rapidly made the transformation into bear crap.
An ugly rumour has it that a grooming Richard Leakey went into his bathroom only to find the mirror was broken, panicked , and then tried looking into the toilet bowl to see if he could see his reflection in the water, just like the original Narcissus, only to find the light bulb was dead leading to an attack of Post Dramatic Stress disorder.
God help us! Where do they dig these people up?

Addenda; ask yourself a simple question. Why is it that dictator Robert Mugabe, in the hunter friendly country of Zimbabwe has an expanding elephant herd of 70,000 while Kenya with its Leakey, animal protectionist wildlife policies has a declining herd of 2,000.
It was once believed that there was an elephants graveyard in the Northern Frontier district where old elephants went to die. It was a myth. What is not a myth is that Kenya is where old wildlife conservation frauds go drink gin and tonic and to develop book and movie contracts over bon fires made from burning elephant tusks.

Addenda. The definition of insanity is behaving like you did once before and expecting different results. Kenya tried burning elephant tusks the first time to improve its conservation prospects and that didn’t work. Kenya tried doing the same thing a second time and that didn’t work. Now they are going to do it a third time and that won’t work either. Insanity drives wildlife conservation in Kenya.
They need to find a new direction. Angela Jolie and Richard Leakey are both missing considerable body parts. Perhaps, a kind of cloning or boutique DNA cherry picking process, could cobble them together into a new bi-sexual, sapient, chimera kind of being that could derail Kenya’s obsessive/compulsive tusk burning and lead the country in a shining new direction—-going forward—-as the PR firms, behind the tusk burning, are prone to say.

The press release for Mr. Leakey’s latest tusk burning festival says Kenya’s cocktail party conservationists will burn eight time as many tusks for this third tusk festival as they did for tusk fire fest two. Wow! The event just keeps getting bigger. The organizers must be very proud.
That also means elephant poaching in Kenya has increased eight time between tusk fest two and tusk fest three. The insanity rule very definitely applies here. Things just keep getting worse and the organizers just keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Kind of like watching metally ill people who just keep punching themselves in the face. I guess column inches of free publicity must be the yardstick by which Kenya and its PR firm judges successful elephant conservation.
Just for a change they ought to try to bring in someone like Rolf Baldhus, who doubled the elephant population in the Selous, in 14 years, to the event. That is an increase of about 50,000 elephants in today’s Africa. Who else has done that? Try management by results instead of Leakey’s management by failure. It might be a new turning point for elephant conservation.
Baldhus say the underlying problem is corruption and so eventually even Zimbwabwe will die too. He could touch bases with George Soros, a star player at the Kenya festivities, and he is very familiar with the downside of corruption because he was convicted of insider trading in France and denied appeal.
David Attenborough will be there too. He could make a movie to celebrate the event and if there aren’t any elephants left in Kenya by the time he gets there, he could round up the film crew for the BBC’s Natural History film unit and taken them to the Berlin zoo to get the “wildlife” footage he needs just like he did before with polar bears.

I see where pop star, gay rights activist, and elephant expert Elton John will attend the tusk burning barbeque. That’s a stirring development but with elephant populations in rapid decline this is the wrong time to encourage elephants to turn gay. The usual pop star who shows up at these politically charged events is facebook $billionaire Bono. I always inadvertently tip the “N” in his name, on its side, and end up with Bozo so if I do it again by accident I extend my apologies to Bozo. Apparently $billionaire Bozo, one of, if not the world’s very richest pop stars, is now persona non grata in Africa, and risks being lynched if he shows up. Apparently he created a foundation to raise money to save starving Africans only to have the British newspapers report that only 1% of the money he raised went to starving Africans and 99% went to “administer” Bozo’s foundation. Perhaps he will use his facebook $billions to make amends, distribute a few Big Macs, and then he too could get himself invited to the tusk burning barbeque.
Barrack Obama hasn’t said he will show up as yet but he probably will because it would give him a chance to renew old familie ties. He is a member of Kenya’s very small Luao tribe, and as an expert or international terrorism, he could meet up to take notes from fellow Luao tribalist Joseph Coney, the world’s worst terrorist and the man responsible for wiping out the northen white rhino and elephant populations in Garamba National Park.

I agree that there is a problem with the eco-tourism in Kenya: “many of the lodges are owned by foreign entrepreneurs and corporations, and the profits tend to trickle up to their proprietors and Kenya’s deeply corrupt oligarchs, not down to the poor farmers and herdsmen on the land.” This is exactly why trophy hunting doesn’t work also: the money goes into foreign bank accounts and into the pockets of corrupt politicians. So how can trophy hunting solve the problem? I think the eco tourism should be reformed and some of the revenues should go to the locals. I remember a conversation I had with a Kenyan on FB. He was associating the wildlife with the presence of foreigners and he said something like this: “I wish all the lions disappear and maybe then the foreigners who own the hotels and lodges will disappear also. They treat us terribly and they think we should be grateful that they allow us to go through the garbage looking for food”. Maybe the greed of the foreign lodge owners and the corruption of the politicians is what is killing the wildlife in Kenya, not the lack of trophy hunting.

The reason trophy hunting works, and South Africa is the best example, is (1) because the wild animals, as trophies, become more valuable than cattle sheep or goats so land owners let them live on the land because if they do they make more money; and 2) the value of the animal doubles because all the trophy hunters take home are the head skins and the horns. The meat stays in Africa. Luke Samaras safaris has been feeding half of Dar es Salaam with free meat from the Selous for 20 years. Cardboard boxes full of dried meat go to Dar every week. Elephant hunters in Zimbabwe and national parks there have handed over 500,000 elephant carcasses for poor villagers to eat since 1930. The hunting safari operators have been alot more helpful to the poor in Zimbabwe than the UN food program. Big game shooting for sport is win win win.
In Kenya the wild animals in places like the Masai mara are completely protected, and the parks that are set aside for photo safaris, are vermin breeding reservoirs. Since the wild animals cannot be legally hunted or utilized the local Africans have no vested interest in them, and get no meat from them, so they raise cattle sheep and goats and grow crops which are legal for them to eat. If they eat game they are called poachers. Jane Goodall hates these poor people and their “bushmeat.” She takes in at least $16 million in donation very year and can afford fish and chips back home in England.
The protected wild animals like the eles in the parks then raid the crops, and the lions from the parks kill the cattle (and children). They promotion of protected areas and photo safaris turns wild animals into vermin. Its lose lose.
In addition, the theory behind trophy hunting, and admittedly it doesn’t always work this way, is to shoot adult males that are past breeding age ,so the annual population increase is always the same and the population is not depleted by regulated sport hunting.
In nature all living beings over re produce their own populations including slow reproducing species like the human race. The rate of reproduction varies from species to species but for example I think with buffalo its about 7% per year which, if you use banking formulas, means the population will double every 7 years. That rate of increase, if utilized as an annual offtake, is the same as making interest on money in the bank and the base wildlife population remains the same.
Read Aldo Lepold’s 1933 book “Game Management”.
The flies in the ointment are the wildlife film industry which likes to hand wring and take everything out of context, and the animal rights movement which saves only red herrings.
They make their money manipulating ignorant people’s emotions. Notice they are always called the “Fund” for this and the “Fund” for that. The people behind these “funds” are human garbage who use PR firms and ad ajencies (and not science) to develop the spin they use to fleece people of their money. Thus we get “Cecil” the famous lion, Frodo the child killing chimpanzee, and slogans like “We Save. They kill”. They have nothing to do with wildlife conservation which is based on the study of population dynamics.
The tusk burning festivals, and the next one will be the third, have had no positive effect of wildlife conservation and won’t have any in the future. An endorsement from a wildlife film company like the National Geographic Society is the kiss of death for willdife conservation because the rule of thumb they live by is “don’t offend the advertiser which means they can’t be linked to killing because the little old ladies in tennis shoes, who buy the soap suds their advertisers sell, will stop buying the soap. The tusk burning coctail party in Kenya will attract all the wrong people.
In addition, photo safari people have a vested interest in having tame animals because they are easy to film. They do not try to run away from the photographer like they do in hunting areas. They need tame animals to make money and park animal get tame and ignore people. That is why most of them including David Attenborough, fake wildlife footage like Attenborough did for the BBC when he filmed polar bears in the Berlin zoo.
It has to be easy for them to get the footage or they can’t make any make money.
All the wrong people like George Soros, who was convicted of insider trading, will show up in Kenya, and truly successful conservationists, like Rolf Baldhus, won’t get invited. In a period of 14 years, in Tanzania, a corrupt country, Baldhus brought about an increase of 50,000 elephants and just this year he stopped elephant poaching in the Selous. By comparison Leaky has been impotent to stop the loss of 70% of Kenya’s wildlife in the last 10 years.

addenda, As I said above Zimbabwe National Parks, during the Ian Smith years, had African wildlife conservation down pat and set a great example which Kenya should follow becaue it would work. They incorporated animal protection and photography(in parks), buffer hunting zones between villages and parks, (like the place where Cecil was shot and where Cecil’s cousin killed a photo safari guide, last name Swales, a month later, and South African style trophy hunting on private land at places like Buffalo Range which I visited and which was a paradise before Mugabe’s “war veterans” completly destroyed it. They also developed a huge body of management and population dynamics research that did not include a single reference to a lion named Cecil or a baby killing chimp named Frodo. I have used their old library myself. Likely the research has been used since independence to make cigarette papers? Zimbabwe also developed some extraordinary conservationists like Clem Coetzee who single handedly moved all 300 black rhinos out of the Zambezi valley when they were threatened and figured out how to catch and move whole herds of wild buffalo and elephants. He was not fashionable however because he also culled 25,000 elephants from a serious overpopulation that even now still numbers 70,000. Most of the good guys in National Parks have died or left Zimbabwe but a few are still around. Rob Murray, who put me up when I visited Hwange, is living in New Zealand.
By comparison to what Zimbabwe was Kenya is a wildife conservation joke.

A helicopter pilot named Gower has just been shot down and killed doing anti-poaching work in the Maswa Game Reserve in Tanzania. Maswa “Game Reserve” is really a hunting block and the anti-poaching helicopter was paid for by Tommy Friedkin who owns Tanzania Game Trackers, the best sport hunting company in Tanzania.
Watch how main stream media will lie and spin this out. They will hype up the words “poaching” and “game reserve” planting the idea that some sort of selfless “envrionmentalist was doing the “anti poaching” in a protected area but they will never once mention that a sport hunting safari company was paying to do the anti-poaching in a hunting block. Friedkin once provided the National Geographic with a freebee sitatunga hunt to point of the benfits of sport hunting and they took a photo of a dead trophy sitatunga, wrote the story and photo out of context, and implied the sitatunga was taken by a bushmeat hunter.
The BBC, for being a place where they separate men, like Jimmy Saville, from the boys with a crow bar, has for many decades tried to redefine sport hunters who do wildlife conservation, as people who saw the light and changed. They call them “hunters turned conservationists”, the idea they try to plant is you have to be one or the other and cannot be both.
The most recent was Anton Turner, who lived for a while in my house, in Dar es Salaam. Anton was a nice guy, who got a PH licence, and then almost immediately got a job at the BBC leading children on a tour that retraced Dr. Livingstons steps. I very much doubt if he took more than one or two safaris but he was immediately defined as a hunter who had changed his ways. But Anton had no experience elephant hunting and they hired him to take the kids into the Selous Game Reserve, which at the time, because of the work of Rolp Baldhus, had the largest elephant population in Africa,. The idea was to retrace the steps of Dr Livingston, and Anton was killed almost immediately by an elephant. Had the BBC hired a real eleehant hunter like Luke Samaras, who can read ele behaviour like a map, there would have been no deaths and no childrens’s lives put in serious jeopardy.
Driving the BBC’s “hunter turned naturalist spin” got Anton Turner killed.

South Africa is a Bad exemplar as it doesn’t represent the rest of Africa. Most of the land is privately owned and the trophy hunted animals are Bred like cattle for the purpose of hunting. Did you hear about Canned Hunting? I personally don’t consider this conservation. The Kenyan problem has a lot to do with the population explosion and the level of corruption that is very high even by African standard. Since when is Zimbabwe a good example ? 300 elephants were poisoned not long time ago, baby elephants are being kidnapped from the wild and shipped to China…. Zimbabwe is Hell for wildlife…. Why don’t you mention Botswana, the rhinos from South Africa are being relocated to this country for safety. YES Botswana is the best example that wildlife is better off Without trophy hunting.

Regarding anti -poaching. In Niassa all but one of the 19 concessions are hunting concessions. And guess what, the elephant poaching is out of control there and WCS took over trying to control the situation with money raised from the animal lovers! It appears that the hunters are on the reserve 4 -5 months a year during hunting season and hardly do anything to stop the poaching .

“Real ” elephant hunters get killed by elephants sometimes (and some of us don’t feel sorry for them ) see “A celebrated Texas-born hunter was crushed to death by a baby elephant in Zimbabwe as he tried to measure its ivory tusks for an American client.
Ian Gibson, 55, was a lauded figure among U.S. safari enthusiasts, who would commission him to slaughter prized animals near his home in South Africa.”

Children,
Botswana has more than 100,000 elephants and that huge number accumulated while elephant hunting was going on. The hunting season was only stopped two years ago. They will probably soon collapse from lack of food due to overpopulation.
You are right about Niassa in Mozambique. There are hunting safari companies there and they cannot afford to control the ivory poaching and are not controlling the poaching, which is horrific. But they can certainly help if they are allowed to. They were not allowed to help control poaching in Kenya, which they were doing, and now the country is a wildlife conservation basket case.

I googled the WCS, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and see it has honorable roots being founded by avid sport hunters like George Bird Grinnel, Teddy Roosevelt and WT Hornady all of whom wrote very good books about the joy of shooting big game for sport. Hornady is the name of a popular bullet.
In recent years it seems to have raised a great deal of money but seems to have lost its way and accomplished very little or really if the truth be known nothing at all except salaries for staff.
My recommendation would be for the WCS to hook up and finance the sport hunting safari operators in Niassa as they will be able to achieve what the WCs has been unable to achieve. Financing the safari operators to put anti-poaching units in the field for 12 month of the year rather of just during the hunting season is the best way to start. On its own the WCS will fail but if they support some of the Niassa elephant hunting operators like Johan Calitz, whos in the long range reconnaisance unit of the South African army (the recces) and if allowed to take the bit in their teeth they will yield results.
On its own the WCS will fail.

Dear Carmen,
I have a good friend who had the largest one day floppy count in the history of the South Africa army. Anti poaching appeals to him. If the WCS can convince the Mozambique authorities to unleash this individual and some of his buddies in Niassa, and if the WCS will pay for it, I feel sure headway can be made. Its a far better idea than hiring American University professors who show up in Africa, knowing nothing about Africa, and leave years later knowing even less than they did when they arrived.

You don’t like South Africa, and say you “don’t consider this (their wildife policy) conservation” but all the rhinos being introduced into Botswana all come from the success of the South African conservation that you “don’t consider to be conservation”.
Botswana is lucky because there are only 2 million poeple, and both the army and president are on side, and they have money from diamonds, but already about 100 problem lions a year are being killed for nothing and hunting has only been closed of two years.

In SA I have done hunting for many years ; everywhere either closed fenced farm or conservancies we find game ;shot for the pot over the years kudu , impala ,gemsbok,nyala,warthog, duiker,mountain reedbuck ,springbok ; every year we get the provincial gazettes and there we now what can be shot or not ; I take my licenses and contact the farmers; hunting is done on foot and by walk and stalk as we know it here ; some friends have also hunted in namibia ; same principles and concept.

@jayefe, the white rhinos now being introduced all over Africa including Botswana, Uganda and perhaps even Kenya (not sure about Kenya) all come from hunter friendly and successful South Africa. Almost all of the bongos now being re-introduced in Kenya come from a single hunting ranch is Texas. The hunting based conservationists are trying their hardest to get Kenya do the right thing and to make Kenya look good but its an uphill struggle in the face of those conservation wrecking balls called the animal rights movement.
The collection of $billionaires showing up for the Kenya tusk burning party, like Bloomberg, Allen, Soros, and Robert Schad in the background of the IFAW, smell more to me like the carpet baggers who showed up in the USA after the civil war than wildife conservationists. Leakey works for the world bank so I guess he is their technocrat contact there. Soros is not just a criminal who was convicted of insider trading in France, but he has also been implicated in destabilizing other countries like Georgia. I wonder what the plan is for Kenya? There is something going on that does not make sense.

I googled white rhino introductions and re-introductions into Kenya, Zambia, Botswana, Uganda and Cote D’ivoire. The rhinos all come from South Africa where the incentive to build white rhino populations came from trophy hunting. Hunter friendly Nambia seems to provide most of the black rhinos. It looks like Richard Leakey’s policy of shooting poor people, whom he, like Jane Goodall, calls poachers has completly soured wildlife conservation in Kenya. The time has come to rid Africa of the kinds of creepy people who will gather like vultures at Kenya’s next tusk burning festival. They have lost their way and cannot be tolerated any longer. The world needs conservationists like the sport hunting community in South Africa and not the narcissists who gather in Kenya to feather their own beds, with movie and book contracts, and who then proceed to bugger up the world.

I googled Evgeny Lebedev, the organizer and money behind Tusk fest 3, and see he really is interested not only in elephants but also in bull fighting. He hired a bull fighter to teach him the trade and could perhaps teach Jane Goodall the finer points of planting the sword if she shows up at the party to convince him that she shares 97% of her DNA with chimpanzees. I’ve seen her in Dar and think what she says is probably true. His father is $billionaire, Russian Oligarch, and ex-KGB agent Evgeny Lebedev, who was recently arrested and charged with hooliganism, for punching a debating candidate on Russian TV. He is currently doing community service work. As an ex-KGB agent he has also admitted to buying a london newspaper and using it to spy for him.
So Tusk fest 3 ought to be a great party. You can expect fist fights, piss ups, movie stars, the whole ball of wax.
Google “The Strange World of Evgany Lebedev” for more details. Well done Mr Leakey. Another conservation first. This is going to rank right up there with the total collapse of elephant population in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, as outlined quite accurately by Peter Beard in his book, “The End of the Game.” The phrases “Wild life Conservation in Kenya” and “The End of The Game” being virtually synonymous.

Dear Mr Lebedev,
If this site comes to your attention, and you are serious about elephant conservation, cancel this Kenya tusk buring charade, and get in touch with Rolf Baldhus. His area of expertise is Tanzania but he knows the unheralded good guys in other African countries too. He can explain what must be done and exactly what it will cost - tomorrow!
If you want to rub shoulders with the nutters from tinsel town hold your tusk burning festival in Hollywood instead of Nairobi, and just make sure you provide the free booze and drugs. They will all show up.

Dear Mr Lebedev,
If this site comes to your attention, and you are serious about elephant conservation, cancel this Kenya tusk buring charade, and get in touch with Rolf Baldhus. His area of expertise is Tanzania but he knows the unheralded good guys in other African countries too. He can explain what must be done and exactly what it will cost - tomorrow!
If you want to rub shoulders with the nutters from tinsel town hold your tusk burning festival in Hollywood instead of Nairobi, and just make sure you provide the free booze and drugs. They will all show up.

There is an interesting story about the Zimbabwe backlash to Cecil Fundraisers and where the money goes at http://Sundaynews.co.zw/ce…aising-raises-stink/
It seems that hundreds of $ thousands are being raised on the back of cecil, and kept, outside Africa, and next to nothing trickes in to wilfle conservation in Zimbabwe. Same as Kenya’s photo safari business.
Hordes of worthless men and women, including people from top ranked universities, milking the pseudo conservation cow, and tossing out platitudes to defend the fattening of their own pocket books.
I would not be surprised to see the wildife biology programs of universities like Cambridge, where they give chimps cartoon names like Frodo, and Oxford who stirred up this Cecil thing, very soon being shut down all across Africa on the basis of financial parasitism.

The law of unintended consequences seems to have kicked in in Zimbabwe. The UN says the poor in Zimbabwe are now starving. Could it be related to the fact the US Fish and Wildlife service decided to ban the import of ele tusks from Zimbawe? Half of the safari market comes from the USA? Those eles carcasses from legal hunts mostly went to feed the village poor when legal and regulated hunting went on. Now nobody feeds the poor and yet there is lots of food. Zimbawe has 70,000 ele and room for 30,000. It looks like the US Fish and wildlife service has set up a situation where both the people and the eles will starve when neither has to were regulated hunting allowed. You would think they would have learned from the catastrophic ele starvation precedent set in Kenya’s Amboseli. Hopefully the ghost of Clem Coetsee will step in and save the day - for both the people and the eles.

The Bubye Valley Conservancy in hunter friendly Zimbbawe has 200 surplus lions that they may now have to pay some one to cull. At one time there were only 17 lions in Bubye but now there are 500 and room for 300. Kenya with its completely failed wildlife conservation policy should step up to the plate and import them into those areas where Kenya’s lions are being poisoned off and rapidly vanishing. Its easy for them to get the money. All they have to do is sell a few elephant tusks instead of burning them. The downside of killing the lion hunting market for cats originating in Bubye, is that Bubye has the third largest black rhino population in the world and money raised from lion hunting is what paid for the anti poaching.
Well done Louis Leakey, well done National Geographic Society, well done BBC Natural History Film Unit, well done David Attenborough, Well done International Fund For Animal Welfare. You have proved decisively that you can’t fix stupid. Its DNA related.

I wonder if people are begining to realize what is going on. Preachy Kenya is going to tell the world how to conserve African wildlife in conjunction with a book and movie launch. In the meantime they get 80% of their their bongos from a trophy hunting ranch in Texas, 100% of their white rhinos from a trophy hunting driven program in South Africa and now Bubye in Zimbabwe, a trophy lion hunting driven conservation project has 200 lions for Kenya if they want them.

If any of the various $billionaires, such as the guy who runs Panthera, who are going to attend this nut bar tusk buring function, are serious about lion conservation. Consider this. Read Wilfred Thesiger’s book about the marsh Arabs. There is a vast marsh in southern Iraq Iraq that held alot of lions until WW1. Saddam Hussein drained it. It has now been turned back into a marsh. If the wild pig population has reestablished itself consider plunking the 200 surplus Bubye lions there or better still - some tigers. Great tourist attraction in the future and all the big cats need is a food base, and this is yet another of the many such places around the planet.No need for them ever to go extinct and its very cheap to save them. No need for universities, book publishers or film makers to ever get involved. They are just parasites.

I see where Peter Fick from Bubye is offering the 200 surplus wild lions, a surplus of 200 created by a lion sport hunting program (which also pays to save the third largest black rhino population in the world) to anyone who will re-introduce them any where in the world. These are not buggered up lions like Elsa in need of mothering by some dumb western woman. They grew up in the wild and they already know how to kill and thus look after themselves.
For example last I heard lions are either extinct or near so in Nikolai Koba Park in West Africa. If there are enough antelope there now, for them to survive, here is a large and ready made wild lion population. These are not buggered up “book promotion” captive lions like the late “Elsa”. They are completly wild, know how to kill and look after themselves, and the people to package them up for shipment are in place.
Time for the animal rights movement to take the moral high road. Forget the Malibu beach house, forget rooking bed wetting age children out of their money, which is really child slavery.
Save a few lions. A guy with bags of money like Leonardo de Crapio could write it off his taxes and do something worthwhile with his life and his money for a change.

Why not sending them into kenya or other parts of west africa where they can be roaming free ? also mozambique ?- gorongosa ; it sounds like they are battling in gorongosa to grow their numbers ; just asking ; I am not a sme ;rgds

Dear jayefe,
There are many places where they could go. Big cat conservation is simple and cheap. The people who purport to save them are the problem. The cats just need a food base and enough protection to sustain a level population.
But the money for media and animal rights activists, who always have their hands out, is not in conserving lions.
Its in the handwringing, having the sky fall down, rooking little old ladies out of their inheritances, rooking young children out of their school fees, and in movie and book promotion.
The formula of a white woman in Africa saving the world, and most were eventually murdered, was kicked off by Joy Adamson. Her book “Born Free” struck a sympathic note with dumber than mud urban white women, and attracted the attention of parasites because it made alot of money. It sold 4.5 million copies, and was spun off into movies and ended its days as a ladies “protein Hair spray” and a foundation.
There never was a famous lion named “Cecil.” nobody who grew up with ten miles of Cecil every heard of him. Cecil is all about getting people to give their money to charlatans. It has nothing to do with conservation. Its spin. Pure Spin.

i had lunch a while backwith a tall ships captain who has been sailing the South Pacific for the last 18 years. He says there are many uninhabited islands down that way. They have only rainwater and no standing water so no people live on them but in some cases pigs do. Pigs are the favorite food of the tiger and tiger require less water than pigs. There ought to be plenty of place to plunk down some tigers, New Guinea especially, until the world has finished going to hell.

That is the video jayefe. A lion wandered out of Nairobi National Park into an inhabited area where he was not welcome and got himself shot by hired guns from the Kenya Wildife Service. The Kenya song and dance has always been that lions don’t leave Nairobi National Park and go into populated areas, where they become dangerous, but this one did. Kenya lost $50,000 and had to hire someone and buy a vehicle to kill that lion and Kenya has no tax base to speak of. The failed Kenya Willdife Service seems to be donor dependant.
You do no harm shooting top of the line predators. Bubye started with 15 lions, has been consistently hunted for lions, and now has 500 lions. Kenya hasn’t been legally hunted since 1977 has been steadily losing all its lion just like the one in the video above that was killed for nothing.
The kinds of words faked wildlife film makers like David Attenborough use, words like “balances”, “tipping points”, “apex predators” etc. is meaningless jargon, in most cases written by PR firms or ad agencies.

It would be a good idea for lion conservationists to see how hunter friendly Bubye has managed to created an expanding population of 500 lions (they now have too many lions) from a base population of 15. Richard Leakey and the Kenya Wildlife Servive, under the watch of the Internatuonal Fund For Animal Welfare, and doors like $billionaire Robert Schad have done nothing but fail by comparison. Does it have anything whatsoever to do with not shooting lions under six years old or is that current rule of thumb, promoted by a National Georgraphic linked biologist just more junk science? I know Marten Nel who runs the lion hunting at bubye. I once hired him as a baby sitter but I have not talked to him for years..

I see where another lion has been killed leaving Nairobi National Park, something Kenya’s cocktail party conservationists tell us lions don’t do. The dead lions all have cartoon names too. Hopefully one of America’s “Hall’s of Higher Learning” will soon hire Bugs Bunny to chair their wildlife ecology program and have Bugs get to the bottom of the lion problem. Cambridge University in England is already happy having its academic subjects such as child killing chimps being given cartoon names like “Frodo.” Darwin must be spinning like a top in his grave.

right out of the gate your info is false. you claim they are hunting without rules..100% lie. all hunting in any country has laws and regulations, love how yoi throw the poachers that are taking them illegal in with legal hunters following regulations.
“yes you are that propagana guy you claim not be be lier, those lies are just in the first paragraph

I watched the MSM interviews about the elephant tusk burning about to take place in Kenya. The rational by Louis Leaky and the head of the KWS service was that this will somehow ensure ivory, and by extention elephants, will have no value and poaching will stop. Fat chance!
Animals that have value do really well. Examples are cows, chickens, turkeys, water buffalo and hunted red deer in Scotland. They are all very common. Animals that have no value and eat crops, which elephants do, rapidly devolve into vermin and are exterminated.
What a bugger up! This tusk burning is almost as bad as all the plastic garbage created by environmentalist Robert Schad, of the Schad Foundation, the environmental group that has financed both Kenya wildife consrevation, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and David Suzuki.
Schads plastic garbage now blankets the world’s seas as the recent flight by a sun powered aircraft that flew around the world has revealed.Billionaire Roberts Schad and his daughter Lilli, asks very young children to send them $300 in return for a bag of worthless trinkets. I look on it as recruiting child slave labour.

Something very strange and really evil is going on in Africa and this tusk burning, with Leakey as a world bank rep, is part of it. During the colonial period Europeans invested their own lives and money in Africa and many died there from things such as malaria. I have read that Lord Delamere did not make a nickle until the year he died. The Blixens are famous for losing a fortune. I assume these businesses created a tax base that supported the police and colonial administration but maybe I am wrong there. Maybe all the money came from abroad. Not sure. Regardless the game departments of the day seemed to work. There were plenty of rhinos and 6 million elephants during the years of European administration.
The fly in the ointment of African wildlife conservation seems to have been Karl Marx. The communist Russians, the same people who bankrupted Russia, instigated and supported African independence movements by creating black resentment of Europeans and their economic success (and creation of a tax base). The Russian communists were in Angola and South Africa and the North Koreans in Tanzania and the Congo( the Simbas).
What communists know how to do is centralize power in the hands of a few and Liberty depends on the distribution of power the two main documents in support of individual Liberty being the Magna Carta and the Constitution of the United States.
Anyhow the commies won in Africa and all the governments took the “centralization of power route” and the national leaders became rich Pashas which was an old African tradition anyways. However, this destroys businesses and along with it the tax base.
The average African makes $300 a year or less. You can’t tax him so there is no tax base and civil servants make peanuts. the civol servants extort money from any private business that manage to hang on until they too disappear.
Once the tax base is finished along come the NGOs to dispense crumbs. The stake holders become the NGOs who get their money from outside and who create no goods or services or tax base like the old colonials once did.
This attempt to make sure elephants in Kenya have no value and cannot be used as food is yet another example of eroding Kenya’s tax base and making sure the country can never support itself but remains forever in the yoke of foreign NGOs, who are the real stake holders in modern Africa.
Jane Goodall takes in a minimum of $16 million a year from her Gombe chimp promotions. I assume almost none of that goes into Tanzania but is kept offshore. The people living around the reserve make about $300 a year if they are very lucky. She is currently making the rounds showing a film of her being hugged by a chimp. She is targeting dumber than mud white women with cash to spare and an average of 4.9 cats.
So heart warming. I only wish someone had a camera in hand when her personally habituated Chimp, Frodo, tried to kill her. The reason for this Cambridge educated scientist Jane Goodall says, is that Frodo was “a bully” and no doubt thousands believe her but I don’t.
Before kibbutz like communism destroyed Africa, progress was being made in developing a tax base and in creating companies that produced goods a services.
That was all swept away during the independence era and now the stake holders in Africa are the itinerant NGOs who produce no good and services and usually just hang around for a few years and then hole up in a University.
The Pasha’s and the carpet baggers are back and in charge. Most of them seem to be mining companies laundering drug money.

addenda, Most strange about this kenya thing is how mainstream media all over the world simultanoeusly backs Kenya and it policies, by far the most incompetent in the history of African Wildlife Conservation, against all other ideas.
Somebody’s agenda is being driven here. It smells just like MSM’s universally bogus reporting about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which was designed solely to drag America into a war against Iraq to Balkanize the middle east for Israel.
Mainstream media is far more dishonest than many conspiracy webaites although most of them seem to be paid for by intelligence services too.

addenda, Most strange about this kenya thing is how mainstream media all over the world simultanoeusly backs Kenya and it policies, by far the most incompetent in the history of African Wildlife Conservation, against all other ideas.
Somebody’s agenda is being driven here. It smells just like MSM’s universally bogus reporting about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which was designed solely to drag America into a war against Iraq to Balkanize the middle east for Israel.
Mainstream media is far more dishonest than many conspiracy webaites although most of them seem to be paid for by intelligence services too.

I see where hunter friendly Zimbabwe wants to sell off alot of its surplus wild animals because they have begun to die off from a drought.
They have an overpopulation of elephants and now the eles may die by the thousands like they did in Kenya’s protected Amboseli reserve.
In its wisdom the US fish and wildife services banned ivory imports into the US killing the trophy market which brought in about $35,000 per elephants and fed a village every time a ele was shot. They have turned hunter friendly Zimbawe into another animal rights Amboseli.
If Kenya, which is now evolving into a petting zoo, just had just not burned its tusks they would have some money and could have used it to stock up on wild animals where they are lacking.
I can see how this is going to spin out. All those wild animals like eles which have value, and create a tax and food base (people are now starving in Zimbabwe) if they are managed properly will now die off by the tens of thousands, just like they did in protected Amboseli in Kenya, and it will be blamed on Global warming when in fact the problem is the animal rights movement..
Many wildlife biologists have been far ahead of the curve for years and knew exactly what had to be done but nowadays the animal rights wrecking balls have stepped in, always with their hands out asking for cash, and they have once again trashed everything.

I see on the news today that there are now only three addax antelope left in the wild.
Fortunately there are a great many, probably several thousand, on the sport hunting ranches in Texas.
As with bongo in Richard Leakey’s Kenya sport hunting ranches can be the salvation of the addax antelope.

I see on the news that Martin Nel and the people at the sport hunting driven Bubye Conservancy with its surplus lion population are having trouble giving away their surplus wild lions away for restocking elsewhere even though many animal rights groups have multi million dollar budgets.
If the newspaper quotes are accurate the Bubye people are themselse guilty of slowing down lion dispersion by adopting politicies such as “lions only belong in Africa.”
Not true. Lions were once found all over Asia, Greece, Europe and in America where it appears either direct action by or compettiton from First Nations Elders , now better known as Stewards of the wilderness, or as Columbus once called them - Indians - exterminated them.
Siberians tigers were once found in Alaska, as their remains have show, and should be restocked.

I see on the news that more than 1,000 white rhinos are now on their way to Australia from South Africa. Great idea. Finally someone out there with a brain.
Then its time to move Bengal tigers into Kakadu National Park, some Asian rhinos and the rarer breeds of wild Asian elephants of which only a few thousand remain. Canada just gave Russia some wood buffalo for re-introduction. Get some Siberian tigers to try near the wild bison herds in British Columbia and plant some others among the overpopulation of moose in Newfoundland.

Everyone talks about economical value that benefit locals. This money does very little if any to the people of Africa…Yes, 100.000 is a lot of money to offer for a hunt, but that money could be used to fund other things which will bring in so much more This money can be “detonated” for per say, amusement parks, water parks,”if they have substantial water. There are so many things that can bring in more tourism without killing an animal. This is nothing but, I will help you if I can slaughter an animal. This money could also go to hiring locals to protect wildlife and work in parks like I mention. You keep saying that trophy hunting is saving wildlife by shooting an animal, your’re so wrong. Trophy Hunting is just eliminating a very important animals whom play important roles in any pride or family. Without large predictors, the deer and anything else in their diet “will overpopulate”. Nature takes care of this cycle, man just interferes and screws it up.. If these rich people can pay them tens of thousands of dollars to kill an animal they can donate that money for other things without killing, but it’s the addiction to killing that these people thrive on. They don’t give a shit were the money goes as long as they have their trophies. They just use the “conservation and economical value” to justify what they’re doing is for the good of the animals Endangered animals should not be hunted period..Better yet, why don’t they just keep their money in their own country and take care of our less fortunate, staring and homeless people.

I see where Kenya president Uhuru (freedom) Kenyetta wants to ban ivory sales. I assume he is from the same family as Jomo Kenyetta, whose daughter Margaret was in charge of ivory poaching in Kenya after independence, and who is the person who shut down professional hunting in 1977 to pull the white hunters, all of whom were honorary game wardens, out of the field. Kenya has gone right down the drain since then.

Blame it on whatever you like, the fact remains that the decline of wildlife is not do to the absence of Trophy Hunting.. never was, never is and never will be. You heard me when I said that if they allow Trophy Hunters to enter Kenya that the wildlife will diminish more. That, is a fact. There are many ways to help Kenya through funds, donations and people who actually know how conservation works. If Kenya wants to florish with wildlife, they should just ask South Africa how they do it. . They breed lions and the country has a lot There are always solutions outside of aroud situations with out killing animal. Humans have always used animals for their own for sadistic reasons and it needs to stop, we can’t keep killing or using animals for profit. It’s a bad idea. like Everyone and every country has their economical problems but we don’t go around killing animals as a solution. It’s all about killing and money no common sense and real solutions. Stop using animals for your advantage and find another way….. Like I said, If Kenya is having problems it most likely has something to do with the terrorst attach where they wiped out thousands wildlife in Kenya. Killing more will do more damage than good. It’s just common sense. B the way, Are you a hunter or affiliate with them. Cause if you are than we really have nothing to say to each other?

@save Africa,
Rant on!
I very much enjoy trying to unravel the meaning of your posts. Its like trying to assemble a jig saw puzzle where all the pieces have one flat side or doing a crossword puzzle that lacks an alphabet.

Now you’re just being an ass. Did you watch the debate on May 4th? Hunting is Conservation? The opposing side won by 65%… But people are stupid, right?
Move on to the next comment you enjoy ripping apart and end with a nasty note cause I’m done with you.

Dear Save Africa,
I am very sorry to hear that you are leaving the conversation. I’ve enjoyed your presence. But could you answer just one question before you leave because I believe its pertinent to gaining and understanding of people with your point of view.
Do you own more than 100 cats?

That’s a strange question, but sure if you are asking this question, it must be something insultive. I made my comment here and You made yours so please do not engage in abusive activity, because I’m really a nice person with a passion for animals.. I happen to know a lot about conversation and the answer to Trophy Hunting along with Poaching and habitat loss. Eliminating more wildlife especially the endangered is not the going to help anything As far as Trophy Hunting is it’s another type of Poaching. Poachers take the horns and tusks and Trophy Hunters take heads and pelts. Really no one can argue that, except a Trophy Hunter. Look, Your opinion and mine may differ from each other but I respect yours and I would appreciate it if you would respect mine. The U.S. is working on possible solutions for Kenya so we’ll just have to see what happens.. I would like to end this with a good note so we will have to end this now.

I see where an interview Ron Thompson made with Louis Leakey is floating around the internet. In it Thomspon alleges Louis Leakey told him the US State Department gave him a grants of $300 million and a low interest loan of another $300 million to burn $3 million worth of tusks in 1989 so the US could say Africans wanted it (they didn’t even know what it was about) and impose some kind of ivory ban. You have to wonder how much money Kenya got for the recent 2016 burn, obviously designed to do the same thing, and who got the money?
It smells just like the false flag 9/11 attack on America by the Israeli Mossad, using Saudi money and patsies, and treasonous insider help from people within the US government.

Canned hunting ranches are a reprehensible abomination! People who think it is ok to “hunt” an animal, sometimes drugged in fenced in areas with no chance of escape are subhuman garbage. It is a sickness, a void in one’s soul that makes them want to kill these animals. A disconnect with all that is natural and good. Even a disconnect with God Himself. It is true evil.

If these “hunters” cared so much about the wildlfe they destroy and butcher they would just donate the huge fees associated with killing them to a true conservation effort, one that would benefit the living animals, sentient beings with families and lives. But no, these rich smug selfish greedy subhumans just have a blood lust to kill and a quota to get that “trophy”. It makes decent people sick. Trophy hunting is a practice that is no longer socially acceptable or sustainable in today’s world, it should have been outlawed decades ago. If these losers really cared they would shoot only with a camera.

Acacia Honey, thank you for your well spoken intelligent remarks. The Ted Gorselines of this world are the problem. No heart. No soul, only nastiness and white man privelege. I am white, and not trying to bring race into this really, but one has to admit that with the ugly lowly blood “sport” of trophy killing there is more than a hint of old boy colonialism. These men are usually fat, white and rich. I am ashamed to be an American sometimes. And I love it when hunters accuse me of being a tree hugger or when they ask me what I have done for conservation. I can tell you, my every extra penny goes to organizations that are helping to save African lions. This is my purpose, it is what I do, and my passion. I have worked non-stop for the last year to help this cause. Trophy hunting is filthy and evil, a truly vile thing. How these smug greedy people can sit there and say that what they do is “conservation” makes me sick to my stomach. We all know that a minus does not equal a plus. Killing is NOT conservation. There is a better way. Yes, it’s a huge challenge and habitat loss may be the biggest obstacle, but in the meantime we don’t need ugly men going to Africa to kill off these magnificent Crown Jewels. These animals are the treasure of Africa. I will fight until the day I die to save them.

Dear Sheryl Schroeder,
I can certainly understand why you are “ashamed of being an American” given the kind of drivel you trot out in regards to trophy hunting.
I am sure that most Americans would be ashamed to claim you as one of their own given your addle headed thinking - and with very good reason.
Anyhow its nice to see that Oxford University has just fessed up and admitted Cecil the lion was shot in a hunting area and was not baited out of a national park. Yet another animal rights tempest in a teapot to rook people out of their money.

I hate to burst your bubble but if Kenya is doing so horrable, don’t you think they would start allowing trophy hunting??? I have friend from Kenya and still lives there would beg to differ from your opinion. He told me that Kenya’s wildlife is thriving and the only problem they have is poaching. He told me that Kenya protects and respects wildlife and their tourism is doing just fine, but what the hell does he know…..

Ted, you really need to go away. You have no idea what “F” you’re talking about! there is no over population of any wild animal in all of Africa. You really need to do the reaserch instead of throwing around your wait around. Any hunter will feed BS to anyone who will listen so they have justification for what they do. Numer 2, Conservation only receive around 3% of those profits and villagers never see a dime. If you like, you can go to Zimbabwe and interview these people your self, that’s if you’re looking for facts instead of what trophy hunters are dishing out. number 3. South Africa is mainly “canned hunting” playground for cowardice hunters. I’m not gonna do this with you . because you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about..Do more updated research and read carefully all updated info on trophy hunting.. When you get your facts straight and grow up and are less abusive, maybe we can have an adult to adult conservation…

Ted, shut up and go find your mom.. Throw your stupid comment around all you want. It appears to me that we are conversing with a playground bully that likes to talk shit… I would advise anyone who reads his comments, to ignore him. All he likes to do is beat up people whom know much more about the topic.. He’s not worth it…Good by Teddy, say hi to your mom for us….

I find it very interesting that the $600 million Kenya got to burn $3 million in tusks in 1989 vaporized and since that date when Kenya got all that money Kenya, according to the BBC, has lost 80 % of its wildlife under the watch of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other worthless NGOs.
I also find it interesting that none of the stars and big wheels like George Soros (convicted of insider trading in France and denied appeal) who were supposed to show up for this last tusk burning festival put in an appearance . I guess they did not want to link their high dollar names to Kenya’s record of total conservation failure.
What happened to them? Where are they hiding?
With the possible exception of India Kenya is the greatest wildlife conservation failure in the history of mankind and its total collapse as a desirable wildlife destination, can be dated durectly to the closure of sport hunting in 1977.
The country no longer has a resouce based tax base. Its dependant for money on creepy animal rights activists and the most loathesome and tainted collection of NGO failurtes ever to soil a conservation program

addenda,
I now see in Seattle newspapers where employees of the sister of Microsoft $billionaire and enviromentalist Paul Allen, who some say closed down sport hunting in Botswana, are now alleging that she smuggled illegal ivory from Botswana into the USA. I wonder what that is all about? The story is an out of court settlement was made?
It smells something like the fact that Margaret Kenyatta, daughter of Jomo Kenyatta, the father of Kenya, was the organized gang crime leader behind the elephant poaching in Kenya, and it was also she that shut down the hunting in 1977.
Anyhow I see that the NRA is now on to the Allen story so all the dirt will eventually come out in the wash.

I hunt and have done so since my childhood. I’ve also hunted in South Africa. I collect all that I can read from a historical standpoint, and considering how those of 50+ years ago lived their lives and conducted themselves from an ethical stance, I have a serious issue with one aspect of African Hunting, and it’s this;
If the minimum rifle calibre for dangerous game is the .375 H&H magnum, then how come there are those who are permitted to hunt with a bow and arrow?
Whilst not a ballistics authority, I’ve carefully studied bullet design and effect and fail to see how the same effect can be achieved by a projectile which instead of travelling at thousands of feet per second, only manages to travel at hundreds. The hydrostatic shock which is set up by a bullet cannot possible be matched by an arrow.
With a bullet we can have room for a margin of error. Not so with an arrow, and even then, considering the remarkable ability of African game to soak up the hoped for ‘shock’ effect of a bullet, the best that the bowman can hope for, assuming that his arrow doesn’t meet a bone of substance, then he’s totally reliant upon the animal bleeding out.
I really don’t want to piss on anyone’s strawberries, but bow hunting of ANY African game, or even any animal which is heavier than 30 kgs, should be outlawed. If we’re to hunt and kill a living creature then we must be honour bound to bring it’s life to as rapid an end as possible and that isn’t achieved with an arrow.
I understand that there’s a huge market with income to be earned from those who would hunt with a bow, but it’s totally unethical and in my view, quite wrong. Those who guide need to consider their future.
Considering Cecil and other lions which are hunted by a bowman, I wonder how many go out without the backup of an experienced man with a suitably heavy calibre rifle. Very few, I’d suggest.

@alex swan. The old timers were no more ethical 50 years ago than anyone is today. If you read the book “West with the Night” by Beryl Markham you find her bragging about her lover Bror Blixen, played by Klaus Brandauer in the Sydney Polack Film “Out of Africa” pioneering the use of aircraft to hunt elephants. If you are interested in ballistics you will have read “African Rifles and cartridges by the gay gun writer, JohnTaylor, and he was an elephant poacher.
The “banning” instinct, mostly favored by fascist British women, doesn’t always work. Hunting of the northern white thino was banned in 1934. Now they are extinct in the wild. There are 20,000 of the southern white rhino and they have been legally hunted for decades.

Ted Gorseline. The professional hunters in East Africa banded together to eventually form the East African Professional Hunters Association (EAPHA), amongst other Associations and Bodies. The principles and ethics which were set within the conditions of membership were eventually adopted by various Governments. Of course there were and are those who care little for ethics or principles and they bring disrepute to an honourable group. To cite those who behave in a shameful fashion and to suggest that the calling of the professional hunter should include those with no thought to their calling, is disingenuous at the very least, as you should be aware. There are horror stories which can be called-up and cited, and we hear of them regularly but to tar all of those who hunt with the same brush, is wrong and doesn’t support your argument.

Sheryl Schroeder, a little forthright perhaps, but in essence, totally correct. Where I hunted the PHs and the Outfitter were at pains to point out that there were no enclosures where we hunted, with the exception of cattle fences of perhaps 3 strands of barbed wire, and looking at the state of them, I wondered if they even served that purpose! I know nothing of the Ranches and wonder at the point to breeding animals which are colour variants and at the production of animals which have heads which are so exaggerated as to be freaks. Such artificial ambitions do nothing to support hunting in its purest form, in my view. One may just as well fly out and shoot the animal in a coral, or better still, save the airfare and simply have someone else kill the animal and ship over the head and the skin.

@ Alex Swan,
Funny you mention the EAPHA. I was once wandering around a place called Madabadaba in the very middle of the Selous Game Reserve when my African companion said, “Bwana Teddy, there is a dead Englishman up on that hill”. You don’t see dead Englishmen every day so I said,” Let’s go have a look at him. Maybe the hyaenas have left his hands and feet”.
So we climbed the hill and instead of finding a body came to the grave site of CJP Ionides and he had been planted there by the EAPHA. I have bumped into such graves all over Africa. Another time I was near the Lukusuzi River in Zambia and stumbled into the grave of an Englishman who had been killed by a lion. I also visited the grave of FC Selous whom Von Lettow Vorbeck killed in the Game Reserve now named after him.
The English have a romantic way of planting the carcasses of their dead civil servants in the most remote corners of the world.I guess it saves the cost of bringing the bodies home. They are usually people who did dumb things like getting stepped on by an elephant. Normally they are also awarded “gallantry” medals and linked to some piece of landscape as far away from east London as possible. Thus we end up with Lawrence of Arabia, Gordon of Khartoum, Clive of India and so forth.
The nice thing about your heros in the EAPHA is they are all dead and cannot be cross examined. They have entered the same mythical realm as Beowulf, King Arthur and Seigfrid. But if you read their books, the same ones you have accumulated, you will find many contradictions in their behaviour.
For example, the famous tiger hunter Jim Corbett claims to have killed only man-eating tigers but take a look at the picture of the “Bachelor of Powlagrah” in one of his books. It wasn’t a man-eater. It was a trophy tiger and Corbett plugged it just like like Dr Palmer plugged poor old Cecil.
Intent, claimed behaviour and real behaviour are often different. Bill Clinton, president of the United States, for example, once said,”I did not have sex with that woman.”
The animal rights organizations for example claim to be interested in wildlife conservation but don’t know anything about it (it relies on understanding population dynamics). They rely on public relations spin and taking things out of context. Their programs like the Cecil promotion are designed to separate ignorant people from their money. The animal rights people are conservation wrecking balls and professional beggars - nothing more. That is how they began. That is what they are now. That is what they will always be. Inshallah!

Hi Ted,
awesome comments!
Hey, regarding that famous wildlife filming couple, I have some news for you, should you be interested in receiving it.
How can I get hold of you privately?
Thanks in advance.
All the best.

Dear Dave,
I’d like to get that information. Amanda Hall who used to post here has my contact address and she could pass it on to you if she has anything to do with this web site. I have often posted it but sometimes you end up collecting batches of nut cases. Do you have a safe site I can contact?
VBR, Ted

Dear Dave,
I’d like to get that information. Amanda Hall who used to post here has my contact address and she could pass it on to you if she has anything to do with this web site. I have often posted it but sometimes you end up collecting batches of nut cases. Do you have a safe site I can contact?
VBR, Ted

Thanks for your reply Ted.
I don’t know about Amanda Hall. Maybe you can tell her to read this message, and lets see how I can get your email address.
You’re right about the nut cases. Flippin’ unreal…
Unfortunately I don’t have a web site man. Only email.
Lets see what can be done. Cheers.

Dear David,
Here is a friend’s more or less abandoned e-mail address, that still functions, that will eventually get your info to me. If somebody trashes it, it doesn’t matter too much.
Its billeweg13@web.de
VBR, Ted

@save Africa,
The National Geographic Society’s credibility faded away to nothing when they linked up with the HSUS. The largest concentration of lions in Africa, 5,000, is in the Selous Game Reserve which since its inception has been for the most part a collection of hunting blocks. The country with the most lions in Africa is hunter friendly Tanzania. The whole of ant-hunting Kenya, including all the National Parks, only has 2,000.

According to Nat Geo fWild, there are about 20, lions roaming the earth. According to Born Free, there about 20,00 lions roaming the earth, According to the Fish and Wildlife, there are around 20,000 lions roaming the earth. You can figue with your big words and what ever you believe, but the problem here is that you are a hunter and will say anything to justified the ugliness you peruse. Who are you or any hunter who kills for a trophy As I see it, you all have a serious problem, addiction and low self esteem. Any way you look at it, it is no different than Poaching..You all kill animals and take what you want from them.. either or, you all kill and minimize the population of the species. You are people who have serious ego problems… Hope the new laws about transporting and airlines refusing to carry..Animals will have a chance to re populate. Unless assholes like you are planing to go and kill some more.

Save Africa, on the contrary physiologists describe those who hunt as relatively uncomplicated people and so I understand it’s because they refuse to consider self-denial of an admittedly rather base instinct. Those who campaign to have their fellow man follow their edicts, on the other hand, are considered to be frustrated by their singular lack of success, and so conversely, rather unhappy souls.

@alec swan,
Physiologists or psychiatrists or psychologists? The later two, along with sociology, are the jewish sciences. That’s how we got Dr Ruth on the Johnny Carson show! She ended up in the milieu in which she belonged.

I see where Christianne Anampour (or Rubin if you please) famed mostly for winding up the war in Syria on behalf of Israel, has interviewed faked wildlife film maker David Attenborough, former head of the BBC’s Natural History film Unit, who gets his polar bear footage from the Berlin zoo, about elephant poaching.
Dear old David points his finger at “poachers” and just who are poachers. They are poor Africans who have been living on the land for 1.5 million years and they have been elbowed out of the financial trough.
They are just like the 42,000 small scale miners elbowed out of the way in northern Tanzania by Nate Rothschild and Peter Monk at Kahama mines. They can’t read. They can’t write and are easy to push around because unlike the small scale miners in the Califonian and Yukon gold rushes they don’t know how to file a claim.
Compare the average African poacher, who makes less than $300 a year, to the Attenborough family. David’s brother, the actor, just died. His Scottish estate sold for about 3 Million pounds and his Beach house on the French Riviera sold for 4.5 million pounds.
I asked a guy familiar with estate sales in Scotland about this and he said if a person is going to own an estate in Scotland he ought not to spend more than 3% of his net value meaning Richard Attenborough must be worth more than $100 million.
Now this is not David, this is his brother the actor, but even so the Attenborough family is swimming in money and from their ivory tower estates in Britain and Europe they are going to lable some guy worth $300 a year (and likely with 10 kids) a poacher and tell him not to kill an elephant that eats his crops and benefits him in no way except through the sale of its tusks. Appaling!
The people who knew what to do were the Rodesians in the National Park Service under Ian Smith. They started out with 30,000 elephants and gradually developed a herd of 70,000 elephants, and in the course of so doing culled and shot for sport 500,000 elephants over a period of roughly 70 years. The sport hunters got the trophies, the government gort a tax base, and the villagers got whole elephant carcasses to eat, the photo safari companies had plenty of animals to film. Everybody got a piece of the elephant pie. It worked.
I think wildlife film makers like Attenborough are dishonest, stupid and greedy and incompetent conservationists. They want the helicopter, the island in the Sechelles or one of the dozens of beach house scattered around the planet and they are willing to film to the death of the last elephant to get it.
The simple TV sound bite defence is always kept simple - they did it - the poachers. That is who is to blame and these film makers deliberately hidethe truth and the details, about wildlife conservation, in their films because it interferes with the cash flow.
They are in bed with the animal rights people who are cut from the same sound bite cloth - “We save! They kill! Send us your money and not only will we save the elephant we will also buy not just a sport fishing resort in the Sechelles but the whole island. But didn’t Jacque Cousteau say that “sport fishermen are perverts.” SHHHH! Keep your eyes on the elephant.

The only reason why South Africa is doing well is because they promote canned hunting…Everything with you people is about money, money money, Animals are not a barging chip! They are simply species l just trying to survive just like you… I feel terrible for them because they didn’t ask for this. Being bread for the bullet is sad., imagine being ripped from their moms so young, just to be priced for death. You people can’t see beyond the barrel of your guns, so your bullshit is just bullshit…

Ted Gorseline, I think that you’re being a bit hard on David Attenborough. His presentation of wildlife to the world is certainly worthwhile. His motives? Who knows, not I but without him the level of education for the masses would be lacking, and in that his contribution is worthwhile. I know nothing of and care little for, his brother, or his former ethics. It’s a simple and undeniable fact though, and as you point out that through the management of the Rhodesian elephants and those elsewhere, whilst man has a vested financial interest in them, so their future is secure. Where I’ve hunted in SA game is preserved and nurtured as a valuable asset, and again, whilst this continues so the future of wildlife, all wildlife, is assured. Even the wildlife parks where there is protection from hunting serve a useful purpose. The overflow spills out with the Parks acting as reservoirs. When the overflow is hunted, income is assured for everyone, black and white and considering their vested interest, so they consider their investment. Of course there are aspects of African hunting which would (or should perhaps) raise an eyebrow, but the alternative is total protection, no management, poaching by those who ‘need’ to earn a living and feed their families would become extended and the one aspect which would suffer, of course, would the the wildlife themselves. The problem arises when the well intentioned but biased manage to convince the world that their skewed and blinkered views hold sway amongst a worldwide public who only ever see or read of one side of the story, a distorted and damaging concept which is difficult to contradict when the simple fact is that there are those who kill wildlife for sport. How to better educate the world? I’m unsure.

@ Alec Swan,
A person who films a polar bear in the Berlin Zoo and tells you it was filmed in the arctic is both a faked wildlife film maker and a liar. That much is chiseled in stone. It doesn’t matter how many Lordships, flat topped hats, or honorary doctorates are heaped on the individual in an attempt to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear. Facts are facts. I know how he makes his films. I worked as a cowboy in the Rupununni not long after he was filming at the ranch of Tiny McTurk to do his zoo quest series.

@ Alec Swan,
A person who films a polar bear in the Berlin Zoo and tells you it was filmed in the arctic is both a faked wildlife film maker and a liar. That much is chiseled in stone. It doesn’t matter how many Lordships, flat topped hats, or honorary doctorates are heaped on the individual in an attempt to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear. Facts are facts. I know how he makes his films. I worked as a cowboy in the Rupununni not long after he was filming at the ranch of Tiny McTurk to do his zoo quest series.

@save Africa,
In theory at least (not always true) trophy hunting only takes the old males, the surplus males, who are no longer breeding. The client pays the bills and gets the head, horns, or skin. The meat stays in Africa and in the case of elephants ALL the meat goes to the locals.
I am told, but cannot confirm that with some species such as black rhinos the old bulls don’t breed but do keep the younger bulls from breeding. If you want more of black rhinos you remove the very oldest bulls and why not make $150,000 doing so. There is a guy named Ron Thompson who knows about this.
Because trophy hunting focuses on non breeding old males the rate of natural increase does not stop and that is why in a protected environment culls eventually become necessary.
If you don’t cull you end up with overgrazing and/or diseased animals. They have been trapping beaver in northern Canada since about 1600 and there are as many as there ever were. If you don’t trap them they die off from disease.
If you turn animals like lions and elephant into vermin which has been the rule of thumb in Kenya they will vanish.
If they make money they stay. That is why catle, sheep and goats are not endangered.

@Alec Swan,
The way to educate the world is to tell the truth but mainstream media cannot do that because the rule of thumb is “Don’t offend the advertisers.” When Clem Coetsee personally killed 25,000 elephants in culls in Zimbabwe it was the right thing to do but how do you sell that to a Joe and Jolene Bloggs drowning himself in Guiness at a bar in London especially when those environmental wrecking balls from the animal rights movement jump in and say to him “We save! They kill! Send us your money!
The place to start is to not believe anything about wildlife conservation that has ever brought to you by mainstream media including Attenborough with his silly recycled jargon about “balances and tipping points and keystone species”.

@Alec Swan,
The way to educate the world is to tell the truth but mainstream media cannot do that because the rule of thumb is “Don’t offend the advertisers.” When Clem Coetsee personally killed 25,000 elephants in culls in Zimbabwe it was the right thing to do but how do you sell that to a Joe and Jolene Bloggs drowning himself in Guiness at a bar in London especially when those environmental wrecking balls from the animal rights movement jump in and say to him “We save! They kill! Send us your money!
The place to start is to not believe anything about wildlife conservation that has ever brought to you by mainstream media including Attenborough with his silly recycled jargon about “balances and tipping points and keystone species”.

Apparently Leonardo Di Craprio has produced a “save the elephant film”. There have been endless numbers of these hand wringers and none have done the slightest bit of good. If there is anything good about this one its that elephants don’t eat people so nobody is likely to end up as bone flakes in dung, as happened when DiCrapio financed a coke head to save grizzly bears which don’t need saving anyways.

I see by the papers today that elephant poaching has allegedly gotten out of hand in Botswana, where they only recently took the professional hunters out of the game fields, and that lions are being speared again outside Nairobi because they are leaving the National Park through a hole in the fence and have become vermin. Let the Masai make $25 k for a trophy lion and watch to see how long it takes before they stop raising $40 cows and saving 25K lions.

Ivory holds a curious fascination for some, and rightly or not, I’m amongst them. Quite why, I’m unsure. A few years back now the Kenyan Government had a grand display where they burnt tons of ivory publicly. It was a move of complete and unimaginable lunacy. Ivory is ‘gathered’ by legitimate culling in areas where there’s little choice and it happens on an annual basis. Would it not make for more sense to ‘brand’ that ivory and offer it on to the open market? I’d imagine that the market is probably quite limited, and with a legitimate and licensed supply being available, the consequences for poaching would create a situation where the returns garnered by those who poach, simply wouldn’t be worth the candle. In time, then a bounty could be offered for those tusks which are genuinely found and taken from animals which have died of natural causes, further negating the need to poach. The problem with poaching is that there is no thought of selection or a need to cull, beyond the matter of being paid. The hinge around which the idea would swing would be that ALL those funds which have been gathered in from legally collected ivory, would need to be returned to the areas where the elephants died, so encouraging those who poach to understand that their elephants are in reality, a valuable asset, and one with no risk attached to it. There is I accept one major flaw in my suggestion, and it’s simply that with corruption by most African officials, from what I can make of it, being a matter of a cultural theme, and endemic, I wonder just how much of the funds from the legitimate sales would filter back down to those who are in need of support. Precious little, I suspect.

More on Canis soupus. The Ontario government has been holding public meetings designed to shoe horn the way to protect Canis soupus thoughout thousands of square miles of forest surrounding Algonquin (or more accurately Feral Dog) Provincial Park and Puckasaw Provincial Parks. Algonquin is the largest provincial park in Ontario and Puckasaw is better known for the limericks it generates pertaining to first nations women once called squaws. The current song and dance is that the southern red wolf is 3/4 coyote and 1/4 wolf, and the northern red wolf is 3/4 wolf and 1/4 coyote. This is not exactly true. The turd in the punch bowl is the dog. Dogs come from wolves so its difficult to separate their DNA from wolf DNA in the Canis soupus soup. However, the only reason coyotes and wolves did not interbreed in the wild a century ago was size. Wolves weighed from 70 to 130 pounds and coyotes about 30 pounds. The intermediate size gap that made interbreeding possible was the dog which comes in various sizes There is a good observation of how this happens in “Yosemite Nature notes”.
So what you really have in the red wolf is a coyote,dog, wolf cross and the culprits who brought this mongrel into being were pet owners. If people in Ontario really want to save the wild wolf what they must do is poison all the so-called red wolves they now plan to protect them and bring in wild wolf stock from the far north as was done in Yellowstone. Doing so will return the true wild wolf to Algonquin Park. Then the animal rights people, who are obsessed with banning things, must jump into the fight and ban the public ownership of pets in those parts of Ontario currently being set aside to protect ferals dogs. Otherwise canis soupus will return.

Addenda - Cost benefit value of the red wolf - In these hard economic times it may be beneficial to have the red wolf, Canis soupus, around. A wolf cult has developed in Ontario, consisting of people who drive north to listen to howling wolves. They have their Farley Mowat books under their arms, and imagine themselves racing for miles through the forest with the wolves on a cold winter’s night . In fact, what they are listenting to are feral dogs barking.
Since they are content with feral dogs, and want to save them, there is no reason why they should not save a few bob and instead of making the long and expensive trip to Algonquin Park, simple stay in downtown Toronto and listen to dogs barking in Hyde Park in the middle of the city. It costs much less and they are listening to the same animal.

Addenda - Cost benefit value of the red wolf - In these hard economic times it may be beneficial to have the red wolf, Canis soupus, around. A wolf cult has developed in Ontario, consisting of people who drive north to listen to howling wolves. They have their Farley Mowat books under their arms, and imagine themselves racing for miles through the forest with the wolves on a cold winter’s night . In fact, what they are listenting to are feral dogs barking.
Since they are content with feral dogs, and want to save them, there is no reason why they should not save a few bob and instead of making the long and expensive trip to Algonquin Park, simple stay in downtown Toronto and listen to dogs barking in Hyde Park in the middle of the city. It costs much less and they are listening to the same animal.

A modest propoal to rename Hyde Park in downtown Toronto as New Algonquin Park. On of the great disappointments that wolf howlers face when making the annual pilgrimage to listen to barking feral dogs in Algonquin Park is that there are often no dogs around. They are often outside the park looking for chained up mates. In this regard, Hyde Park makes a much more reliable destination to visit to hear feral dogs barking and its only a street car token away. No need to leave the city and your dealer an/or pimp behind. The advantage of Hyde Park is not just that it is brim full of feral dogs looking for discarded french fries, but its also chock full of homeless people and the dogs bark at them all night long. So hearing the call of the wild is assured, and that’s very important in this brave new age of instant gratification.

A friend just returned from Arnhemland, the aboriginal reserve in Australia. He said there is thousands of square mile of land full of watrew buffalo, scrub cattle, feral pigs etc and no people. The aborigines have all moved to town. If anybody was serious about saving the Bengal tiger, just plant a handful in Arnhemland and they would flourish at almost no cost to anybody. And so what are the Australians doing. They are going to introduce a virus to get rid of European carp. Viruses mutate very rapidly. Nothing worse than an Australian bureaucrat.

Madness unchained. The Ontario government really has just banned the hunting of feral dogs over a vast area. This not a joke. Its really true. This is so bizarre that it will definitely come back to haunt them.

The bogus red wolf is alot like the bogus “famous Cecil”. There is no red wolf, there was no “famous cecil” and there is no “eastern panther”. All it takes is a few hand wringing press releases co-ordinated with a foundation to siphon off the money. Bolster the BS with a drug adled movie stars and you are off to the races, and with luck and MSM support, a new beach house in Malibu. Take the red wolf. The animal rights movement has now successfully protected thousands of square miles of land in Ontario to save it. But its doesn’t even exist. Its a dog/coyote/wolf mongrel cross. This runty little 55 pound beast has replaced the true 130 pound wolf in places like Algonquin park and now feral dogs are protected and encouraged to breed at the expense of the true wild wolf. The only way to bring the real wolf back to Algonquin (Now Feral dog) Provincial Park, is to poison off the mongrel red wolves and re-introduce the real thing. That is the animal rights movement for you. Nothing but a collection of greedy human wrecking balls. Truly they are the garbage of humanity.

I see where a judge has decided the red wolf in the USA, really a feral dog, should be protected. Great for those people in the US Fish and Wildlife Service who want to keep their jobs. Not good for the genuine wolf whose DNA is being watered down.
Neither Charles Darwin, nor Gregor Mendel nor Isaac Newton had a PHd. Now I can see why.

You’re wrong, I have a friend in Kenya who is the founder of TSVO volenters he says that wildlife where he is is recovering and doing just fine. Before you make a comment, you need to see the big picture. A few decades ago there were about 250,000% of lions. today there is only about 20,000. I Seriously don’t beleive that they neeed managing, do you?? why don’t you ask some of the villagers that live there, not some nut case article. You need to look at both sides of these articles, then you comment will make more sence.
start with one http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/trophy_hunting/?referrer=https://www...

Dear Sandra,
I lived in East Africa for decades and helped the Masai chase lions away from their cattle. I also helped to recover what was left of several villagers killed and eaten by lions. I built schools there. The Sport hunting consortium called the Bubye trust in Zimbabwe now has a surplus of 200 lions they don’t know what to do with. I know Martin Nel the guy who runs it. He worked for me one time. Want some lions ? Give Martin a call. The problem is finding where to put them.
At least ninety percent of the wildlife conservation NGOs out there are parasites. They make their money sucking up to TV with their worthless platitudes. Kenya was and remains the greatest wildlife conservation failure in the history of the human race. Petting zoos for orphaned elepants is not elephant conservation.
I just returned from Karanambo in Guyana. The resorts claims to fame is that is where faked wildlife film maker David Attenborough began his career prattling worthless ad agency jargon about “balances, tipping points and keystone species”.
Karanambo, has been subject to fifty years of steady “protectionist” promotion by people like the BBC’s David Attenborough, and it too is a classic wildife conservation failure.
Diane McTurk, who died when I was there, established the Karanambo Trust to save or at least mother giant otters.
In cities you have cat ladies with hundreds of cats who usually end up eating the ladies once they have died.
In the bush you have their equivalent types of women with their petting zoos full of elephants, chimpanzees and otters. Exact same mental disorder.
Anyhow Diane McTurk protected the Karanambo Trust area for fity years. It didn’t do a dam bit of good. She did not or was not able to address the otter conservation problem except have people like faked film maker Attenborough promote her values.
Fifty years ago giant otters lived in Groups of up to 15 in her part of the Rupununni River because there were plenty of fish. A mine opened in the area and with it the market for fish. The locals have now netted both the Rupununni and Rewa River as far upstream as Corona Falls and there are no longer enough fish to support large groups of giant otters.
The most I saw together was 3 and that was 100 miles upstream from Karanambo and deep in the jungle.
The moment Diane died, her staff went out with a spotlight and shot a female red brocket deer because she had had so few photo safaris they did not have enough to eat.
I ate some of it and it was very tasty although I guess most of the cacass was saved for her funeral which was the very next day.
I find it very ironic that the capping off of a famous animal rights activist’s career was the spot lighting of a deer in her own back yard by her own staff.
The cultural disjunct between animal rights activists and real conservation in Africa is much much worse.

I think its very important to udate the Close link between big money, beach hosues and animal rights activists. I am told that the National Geographic’s Joubert copule who were instrumental in shutting down Sport hunting in Botswana not only own a beach house, they own an Island in the seycehlles that offers Sport fishing. Faked film maker Jacques Coustaeu, who used to slash dolphins to death to get shark footage railed against Sport fishermen calling them “perverts.”

Ted Gorseline, I’m not qualified to support your stance, or not, but you write, mostly, in a persuasive manner with a logic level which seems to make perfect sense.
Here in the UK we have ageing rock stars and television personalities who spout such frightful drivel with theorised hypothesis which makes for no sense AT ALL and they collectively have the capacity to do as much harm to our wildlife and so ourselves as did DDT did in the 1950s.

Dear Alec,
The people in the animal rights movement are in it for the money and for no other reason. Advertising agencies plan their programs. They do not know anything about wildlife conservation at all.
They avoid details and just sucker poor people with simple slogans like “We Save! They kill!” always followed up by requests for money. The money is used to send out mailing lists asking for more even money.
The head of the Humane Society of the United States makes about $450,000. per year in salary and operates no animal shelters. He too has a Malibu beach house. David Attenborough’ brother the actor just died and he had a beach house in the Franch Riviera that sold for $4.5 Million. Its all about money.
Animal rights foundations are worthless.
A good friend just returned frpom Arnhemland in Australia. He tells me all the Aborigines have moved to town. There is a vast wilderness full of feral animals. There are about 350,000 water buffalo and 63 Million wild pigs. The two favorite foods of tigers are water buffalo and wild pigs.
The tiger can be saved for a few hundred K but instead we are treated to a collection of morons asking for more, and more, and more money, while the tiger fades away.
The tigers hunting reserves of the maharajas once Held 47,000 tigers. They were turned into national parks with complete protection from hunting. Now there are maybe 1,000 tigers left.

There seems to be one successful conservation program in the Rupununni and Rewa Rivers. I am not sure who is behind it but I am told it is working. It has to do with the recovery of the Arapaima fishing business for sport fishermen. Arapaima are a very large freshwater fish. They get up to 11 feet Long and can weigh 400 pounds or more. Their numbers were reduced to 400 fish by commercial fishing to feed the mines. A program was put in place with Rewa Village where the Indians built a lodge and now accept sport fishermen and have stopped spearing arapaima to sell the meat. I am told there are now 4,000 Arapaima in the river system. so it seems to be working. they are easy to count because they are huge and most of them live in small oxbows off the main rivers and they must surface every 20 minutes to breathe. I saw several and met an Englishman named Richard who tells me he holds the Guiness record for the largest fish, an arapaima, ever caught on a fly. Like most of the sport fishermen he lets them go after they have been landed.
The giant otter, river turtle, river fish and black caiman conservation programs don’t seem to be working that well. The Otters scare the heck out of black caiman when they are in large numbers. They have the numbers to Keep the caiman confused and the speed to be able to come up under the caiman and bite them on the stomach. The caiman go ashore and just sit there until the Otters leave. A big group can keeps the caiman off balance but when the otters are in small groups like the one to three that I saw the caiman can take them.
Anyhow this is an example of an arapaima sport fishing program leading to a conservation success success and a 50-year-long platitude based otter conservation program with full BBC and wildife Icon Support failing.
Sport hunting can be used the same way but of course it has to be regulated.

It appears that a grudge match has developed bewtween the two main groups asking for and spending $millions to save the tiger.
They obviously have different PR agencies advising them. One Group is using the hand wringer, the sky is falling down angle. They say there are only 1,000 wild tigers left and the way to save them is to send us more money.
Their main competitors for the cash cow have taken a different angle. They say the wild tiger population has now increased to 4,000 and that is proof the money sent to them has been donations well spent so send more.
Discovering who is right is like trying to pick the winner in a ladies mud wretling competition.
I have never been to Asia and don’t know what is going on. I do know that the Aborigines control a vast area in northern Australia and they are now almost all living in towns. This vast and empty wilderness is chock full of tiger food and there are no people for them to interfere with or to interfere with them.
The lack of a food base and huge human populations are also the reasons people are having trouble finding a place to put surplus wild lions. Put the lions in the Gibson desert in Australia. Nobody lives there and there are huge camel populations. Lions eat camels and require less water than tigers. Allegedly they can use blood as a substitute for water although somehow I doubt it. However, many years ago I viisted the southern border of Mali and was told by the local Fulani cattle herders that a few lions still lived there subsisting on livestock. Its a pretty destitute place on the edge of the Sahara desert.
I don’t know how much control Australian bureaucrats have over the Aborigines but if the reserve can make its own laws somebody should do an end run around the Australian government and ask the Aborigines to let them plant a few tigers there. They could also be put in Kakadu National Park. Tiger reseves attract tourists. Feral pig reserves do not.
If we put our faith in bureaucrats and wildlife foundtions we will for sure lose the wild tiger and there is no need. Saving them is simple. Like Joan Jett says, “dirty deeds done dirt cheap.”

Ted, considering your thoughts as to how to deal with the feral pig/cattle/horse/camel populations in Aus by shipping in tigers, it sounds fine in theory but introducing any wild creature in to an unaccustomed environment where it isn’t naturally indigenous has never yet worked. Aus will have learned their lesson with rabbits, I suspect.

Dear Alec,
Its easy to control slow growing wild tiger populations which is why they are almost extinct. Rabbits and cane toads are another thing. I see where the Australians are now going to introduce a virus into European carp to get rid of them.
The world could not survive without its invasive species. Specifically I mean things like tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, mango trees, apples, pineappples - you name it. Nobody in Alberta complains about pheasants and hungarian partridge nor do New Zealeanders complain about brown trout. Its just a matter of being selective. This new Australian idea of introducing viruses into fish make me very nervous.
The great problem with the big cats is no food base and too many people where they live now. These food bases and the possibility of protecting the big cats exist in Australia in places where there are no people.
I don’t have any faith in the ability of the bureaucracy in India or anywhere else to protect them. For a while I followed an attempt by Indians in one semi-desert area, where lions could be introduced, to get some from the Gir Forest in indian to expand their range but there was so much fighting over the lion pie that nothing happened.
I was in Isiro in DR Congo in 2005 and at that time there were 15 northern white rhinos left in Garambva National Park, enough to bring about the rejuvenation of the species (at one time there were only 11 white rhinos in RSA and now there are 20,000) so people from Zimbabwe tried to rescue them but local politics made it impossible. I remember the locals in Isiro thinking “they are our rhinos. You can’t have them although a big chunk of cash might have solved that problem. Then the Lord’s Resistance army moved into Garamaba from Uganda and killed them all. They are extinct in the wild now and as good as extinct in zoos.
I also see where the animal rights movement got some Buddhists monks to give up 138 tigers because they were selling the dead cubs. That is a large reduction in the tiger gene pool and when the predators get low in numbers and interbreed they self destruct. You can see this on the internet by looking a photos of Asian lions and photos of the three wolves now left in Isle Royale National Park in the USA.

Dear Alec, I have personel experience as regards the ease of controlling big cat populations compared to say fast breeders like rabbits and cane toads. In 2001 I camped on the floodplain of the Kilombero River at a place called the Fuu River. There were lions everywhere. I heard them roaring from five different directions one night, the most I have ever heard anywhere. I went back in 2003 and both the lion and vulture populations were extinct. Sikuma cattle herders had moved thousands of cattle onto the floodplain and lions eat cattle so they just poisoned them and wiped out the whole lion population in one year. The vultures disappeared with the lions because they ate the poisoned cattle carcasses too. In 2001 maybe 3050 vultures would instantly show up to feed on a buffalo carcass. In 2003 the number was none at all. The point being big cat numbers are very easy to control. Not so rabbits and cane toads and I have a very uneasy feeling about the new Australian idea of intoducting rapidly mutating viruses to control European carp. I see they have an overpopulation of pigs in Texas but have banned the introduction of big cats into Texas to control them, and yet now they are going to poison off the pigs too.
There comes a time when the bureaucracy itself kills off the wild animals they were created to protect.
It takes decades to build up these food bases that big cats can use and killing off these food bases in remote places does not make and sense.

I see where the National Geographic’s anti-hunting poster couple Dereck and Beverly Jourbert just got whacked by a buffalo and as a result people are sending them money. They will be OK but no word so far about what happened to the poor old buffalo or if it was provoked? Keep your money in your wallet. They don’t need the money. They not only own a Resort in the Sechelles they also own the Island the resort sits on and they sell Sport fishing trips.
Fish don’t fight. They struggle just trying to get the iron hook out of their mouths.

Ted Gorseline, the common sense aspect of your argument is lost when you attack the person rather than their argument. The logic of the points which you raise should be obvious and I understand your frustration when trying to separate reason from rhetorical nonsense, but when that frustration over-spills, then your valued points are lost to the winds.

My heart breaks as I read your incredibly apt and well expressed comment because this is exactly what I feel will happen also. I love being alive in the world and being able to know these amazing animals are here with us. Some of them I have been able to see and view in zoos or wildlife parks and I am always astounded at their beauty, their differences, their evolution. What a privilege! And sadly one that future generations will not experience I suspect. I am glad I don’t have children, the world is going to be unbearable soon

I see where the UN is going to wade into the wildlife fray with the worthless HSUS. Talk about hordes of worthless NGOs eating up huge sums to money to accomplish absolutely nothing. That is the UN for you. Even people with bird jobs there make $160 K a year and if they stay for five years the UN pays their children’a university fees. That can be far more than 150K per year at places like Harvard. What a rip off!
Its simply an attempt to re-create the nomentura class in old and failed communist Russia.
Time to sell off the Un properties in New York, send the money to the various groups of starving poor people around the world and house the UN is a Tennessee trailer park.

As regards housing the United Nations staff in Tennessee trailer parks. It would actually be cheaper to house the UN in tents at the Land Between the Lakes Recreation area on the Tennesee/Kentucky border. Its a big area and you can camp anywhere you want. The whole New York UN staff would fit in there quite nicely. The UN already has all the tents and food it needs. When I lived in Tanzania I used to buy UN tents and sardines from the Indian traders. It only cost 15 Cents for a can for sardines allegedly destined for refugee camps. The tents and sardines were always of good quality and easy to identify in stores because each tent and can was stamped with the words,” Not For Sale-UN Property.”
The other good deal the Indian Traders were offering at that time was top of the line canned fruit in jars - from Chernobyl. Stick a can of that stuff on the dining room table and you didn’t need propane lamps to shower a room with a nice glow.
The UN staff would not have to learn a new language at Land between the Lakes - just the proper way to say “You all!”

I see where a number of animal rights activist leaders are now facing allegations of sexual harassment. One is Wayne Pacelle head of the HSUS, another is Steve Wynn who paid for the Sea Shepherd boat, and a third is now facing lifetime in jail for child trafficking and prostitution charges in Texas.
Give me active sport hunters like Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill,Sir Edmund Hillary or actor and civil rights (first actor to march with Matin Luther King) leader Charleton Heston any time. Just a better class of people.

I see where Wayne Pacelle, president of the anti-hunting HSUS has resigned after sexual hanky panky allegations. He leaves behind a $360,000. dollar per year salary, but at least, like many other animal rights activists, he has a Malibu beach house so he can still rub shoulders with the Hollywood elite like Harvey Weinstein and where he can go to mull over over what has happened.

The Selous Game Reserve has the largest lion population in Africa (5,00o cats) and is mostly hunting blocks.
Recently an American university professor decided it would be a good idea to impose a 6 year age limit on lions to save the Selous lions which don’t need saving.
This has made it impossible to sell lion hunts and so the largest operator in the Selous has just surrendured all of his hunting blocks.
He was putting $2.4 million a year into anti-poaching. The money stops now.
I would not be suprised to see the most successful lion conservation program in all of African history, as put in place by Brian Nicholson, completely destroyed in less than five years, by a single American junk scientist.

Kenya is finished but so now is Tanzania. Its mostly because of corruption.
However, in the Selous Game Reserve, its specifically because of the activities of a single National Georgraphic Society linked American junk scientist whose wife works for the Jane Goodall Foundation.
This human wrecking ball is working hand in hand with the US Fish And Wildlife Service.
They have now successfully destroyed African Lion conservation in the Selous Game Reserve. The largest game reserve in Africa went into free fall about a week ago.
Its India and Kenya all over again. They have forced the major hunting safari companies out of the Selous Game reserve and now the largest wild lion population in Africa is for sure doomed.
Despicable NGO garbage. Despicable!

I see where the National Geographic Society is linked to Kevin Richardson too. They were on watch as wildlife conservation in Kenya died and have been linked to any number of fashionable but nut case projects. They seem to be a ship without a rudder. The NGS has for certain had zero credibility for at least 50 years, and I have been told are just an arm of the US State Department which I guess means the CIA. Hooking up with them seems to be the kiss of death as far as credibility is concerned.

I hope Paul Allen or some other nut case $billionaire picks up the slack in the Selous Game Reserve. Under Brian Nicholson it became the most successful conservation Project in Africa with the largest popupolations of elephant, Lion, Leopard, buffalo (and even a few black rhino) in Africa. Its still relatively intact and only went into free fall in the last 10 days.
Kenya is of course finished. Its now nothing but petting zoos for nut cases. The moment the NGS sets up shop it was the kiss of death for wildlife consrevation. Lots of movies and platitudes and PR firms but no viable conservation and no tax base.
Thankfully the NGS has only recently learned about the BOMA Plateau and went there recently in a helicopter. They have not yet had time to bugger the place up and with no management of any kind it still has the largest wildife population in Africa.

Dear Sandra. The only thing animal rights activists have succeeded in doing in Kenya is destroying the wildlife population to such an extent that the wildlife tourism busines has been replaced by sex trafficking as the main reason tourists now go to Kenya.
I see where the former vice president of the largest animal rights organization in the world is now on trial for child molestation and trafficking in children. Maybe there is a reason the animal rights movement has such a large presence in Kenya ?

I made a few phone calls and am informed that the American lion scientist whose work may singlehandedly now bring about the complete detruction of the wild lion in Africa (and every other wild animal in the Selous Game Reserve) means well. He is allegedly simply an unwitting dupe. In other words he may well have made Lion conservation proposals in the spirit of good will but because of his own personal ignorance of Africa he may have unleashed the law of unintended consequences. I don’t know if you have read the book “The River”, which I tend to believe. about how American scientists spread AIDs throughout Africa but it now seems the same collection of eco-hooligans will now do the same thing to the African lion that American AIDs scientists have already done to the poorest people in all of Africa. That is they will kill them off.

Unfortunately, the next generation that are raised by these people are being brought up to take their place.. I assume that these kids were not brought up watching Disney movies. I have had countless hunters or supporters tell me that this isn’t the world of Disney and I’m following my emotional instincts. These movies taught children to love and respect all sorts of life not destroy it. Their children are taught right from the beginning that hunting them is the way it is..Such a shame. These people are quickly bringing an end to many species of animals, not just the big 5, because when they’re gone, they”ll just go after the others, creating another problem.. I’ve been arguing with this man, “Ted” for a year now and he just babbles on and on. I took a break for awhile because I thought by now he would finally get it. Have you read you read most of his posts?? He just goes on and on. If he offers a link to an article to read, it’s always written by another hunter.
I have been on numerous hunter forums and the hunter’s have been feeling the heat. They’re becoming desperate. The SCI ” Safari Club International”, actually put a lot of money into the Trump and Zinke campaigns. Most likely to by their trust and it’s back firing.. President Trump confirmed that there will not be any elephant or rare animal trophies to be imported to the U.S.. After two months of digging, he said that the practice does “not” help conservation or help anything other themselves and the governments in which allow the practice. You can throw all the hard evidence you have at him but, he and his friends still come up with the same old line over and over again.
Ted, if you truly believe that killing a lion taking stupid pictures with them and cutting them up in pieces actually “saves the species”?? You can never convince me of that, any more than you can convince me that killing a child at St. Judea will save children from cancer. Move on for God sake…

Dear all,
Google the animal rights Website “Animals 24/7” and Google the story ” How will the HSUS board respond To Wayne Pacelle’s Shadow.”
It sure looks to me like the largest anti-hunting organization in the word is now facing complete, utter and absolute self destruction.
The NRA has announced that beginning this month they are going to go on the offensive. If there are any NRA members out there you should tell NRA TV about this so they can get involved and delve into and make daily comments about the HSUS.

I see where HSUs is linked to the National Geographic Society in some films that NGS has made. Given the recent NGS rabid promotion of a junk scientist whose work promoted by NGS may well spell the end of the largest wild lion population in Africa you have to wonder if both HSUS and their NGS partnet NGS are now doomed and are on the verge of self destruction?
Another interesting news release today on rense.com on the internet today says the National Rifle Association membership, already at 5 Million or about the same as the population of Israel, is now exploding at the rate of 4,100 per cent. I find this figure very hard to believe but there you go!

At last word about 100 full time members of an anti poaching patrols financed by one hunting Safari company alone have been relieved of their jobs and pulled out of the Selous Game Reserve. The Selous game reserve, the most successful wildife conservation project in the history of East Africa, as set up by Brian Nicholson, is now in free fall.
At this very moment the Selous Game Reserve has the largest population of elephants, lions, leopards and buffalo in Africa as well as a handful of black rhino.
They will all be gone within a year and the straw that broke the wildife conservation back was a six year age limit on the shooting of male lions. The Selous Game Reseve currently has the largest population of lions in Africa without ever having imposed such an age Limit.
I spent about six weeks in the Selous from Medabadaba and Chiguli falls in the middle north to the Great Ruaha River. The country is crawling with lions.
I think it would be worth the time of the lawyers who read this site to look into the possiblity of suing the American and British junk universities, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Geographic Society with the idea of recouping enough money - in perpetutiy - to maintain the Selous Game Reserve as it is right now.
I think it is also time to develop a process to develop a mechanism to remove the Union Card called the PHd from aganda instead of fact driven scientists because it is used to justify the employment of junk scientists in major universities.
None of the great minds of the ages be they Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Alexander Graham Bell, Divinci, Marconi, Thomas Edison, Newton ad infinitum, ever had one. It’s just a ticket to hell.

I believe there is something very wrong with the story coming out of South Africa right now about how a lioness got away from the National Georgraphic Society’s poster boy, Kevin Richardson, and his story about how it began chasing an impala, and ended up two kilometers away (i.2 miles) and then killed an as yet unidentified 22-year-old woman.
Lions make short explosive charges. They are not designed for long distance running like wolves. They run out of puff after about 150 yards. I can’t understand how the killer lioness ended up that far away.
The story truly doesn’t add up.
Alot of young women in the animal rights movement are being sucker punched both sexually and physically by their male companions. This will probably all come out in the wash if Steve Wynn and Wayne Pacelle ever end up in court.
Timothy Treadwell’s girl friend Annie Hueguenard trusted him and paid the price too. Young women should be very wary of rubbing shoulders with male animal rights activists. Not doing so can easily get them killed. Does anyone know what has happened to the young Joubert woman, another National geographic poster child who got hamered by a buffalo while filming with her husband?

Google some videos of wolves chasing caribou. You will notice they are looking for weakness and when they see it they home in on the weak animal. They identify weakness in a few hundred yards, and if they don’t see it they quit - even though they are very long winded animals. There is no way a short- winded lioness is ever going to run after an impala for 2 kilometers, 1.2 miles, to see if it is weak or not. I know wild lions well but have never worked with tame African lions but I have worked with tame cougars. Caged cougars are not long winded and I have run down two such escaped animals myself and I never spent anytime in my life as a runner. The big cats are short winded. Even cheetahs, who are the best runners in the cat world, and can run very fast, are not long winded, and don’t chase game very far.
I would not be suprised to learn that damage control lawyers from the National Geographis Society have already gotten involved.

Now Google some wild lions chasing antelope, Zebra, wildebeeste etc. Thes are fit wild lions and not tame lions that spend much time in cages and tend to be unfit. The maximum length of a chase does seem to be about 150 yards and not the 2 km (1.2 miles) the lady killer lion is supposed to have gone chaisng an impala. The story doesn’t add up.

Impala temnd to live in a small area of about 400 square acres and don’t run in a bee line to escape predators. They run at half speed because it allows them to leap around and dodge lions because lions are much faster for a short burst than they are. The idea that a lioness beelined after an Impala for 1.2 miles and then ran into the 22-year-old woman doesn’t add up.

There really is something wrong with this National Geographic linked death by lion story. The police contact nearest the Dinokeng Game Reserve near Pretoria is named Connie Moganedi. She is currently in contact with the family. Any reporter wanting to get in touch with the deceased woman’s family should contact her. The family might be Americans. They have not yet said anything.

I took a look at Humane Society of the United States celebrity supporters, since they seem to be very tight with the National Geographic Society, and was interested to see a Lion story by Kate Erbland entitled ” Tippi Hendren Reveals how many peoeple were actually hurt while filming Legendary Insane movie. The movie was called “Roar”. According to Kate Erbland,”cinematographer Jan de Bont was scalped by a Lion requiring 220 stitches, Griffith (apparently Melanie Griffith) required facial reconstructive surgery from a wound, and Noel Marshall was wounded so often that he was hospitalized with gangrene.” Hedren was also linked to sexual abuse in the filming of “The birds” by Alfred Hitchcock.
I wonder if Hitchcock was as anti-NRA as Harvey Weinstein has proven to be over the years.

Hey Ted, gonna leave this forum now because there is no one left but you…You do however, carry on conversations with yourself very well. Some of your comments I find very amusing.
I wish you well Ted and have fun with “yourself” Bye bye now Bye Bye now.. You may respond but I won’ t be notified

Dear Sandra,
I certainly hope that this time you will live up to the courage of your convictions and go into hiding . Nobody likes wishy washy people. Stick to your guns. That’s not to say others have not faced your dilemma. For example, Jane Goodall went fox hunting in England and found it a horrible thing to do. She swore never to do it again. Then she goes to Kenya, meets a dashing, and socially connected young white hunter named Brian Herne and whoops she did it again - went jackal hunting to the hounds only to find find that it was every bit as horrible as it had been to chase foxes with dogs. But then how is a girl to know?
It only took Jane two tries to learn to live up to the courage of her convictions and now you too have tried twice to escape from this blog site but with mixed results. Use Jane as your role model and keep in mind that as far as credibilty goes, its three strikes and your out. There is nothing psychiatrist Jordan Peterson can do for you if you return.
The name Sandra rings a bell. Allegedly there was a young animal rights activist, who when she wasn’t busy grooming her 700 cats, decided to become a movie star. Her role model was Meryl Streep. She hung on Streep’s every word and when Merle called Harvey Weinstein “a God” she looked to Harvey her new role model. She saw by the news that Harvey had a way with potted plants. They never said no. Fearing rejection, she took up a do-it-yourself project modeled on Harvey’s behaviour. Her mom caught her in the act and said,” stop that Sandra! Didn’t you read Lord Baden Powell’s manual called “´Scouting for Girls”, the self improvement book for young ladies that I gave to you. Baden Powel says that if you carry on the way you are now you will become feeble minded and go blind. For a while young Sandra went back to grooming cats but invariably the urgings returned. She went back to her old habits and once again her mom caught her. Her mom screamed, “Sandra! Stop that. You will go blind.” To which young Sandra said, ” Its OK mom. No worries. I only plan to do it until I have to wear glasses.”

The leaders of the animal rights movement seem to have access to an awful alot of cash and not just to buy beach houses. I see where David Wills, former Vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, the largest anti-hunting organization in the world, and a former room mate of Wayne Pacelle, who just left HSUS because of sexual hanky panky allegations, was able to raise $5 million in bail money to fight charges of child molestation and child trafficking. His co-defendant pleaded guilty.
I have a picture of Pacelle posing in photos with Harvey Weinstein and I now see that Harvey Weinstein is being investigated for his links to convicted child molester Jeffrey Epstein. No wonder HSUS has never been able to put much emphasis on running animal shelters. They need their donor money for other purposes.
You have to wonder how and why the National Geographic Society ever got linked to HSUS? Strange bedfellows.
I would imagine that these guys will all eventually end up sipping pina colladas on the beach at Haifa in Israel. Israel has no extradition treaties for financial crimes with the USA but does it have any extradtion treaties with the USA as regards child trafficking ? Weinstein and Epstein are both good buddies of Bill Clinton and Clinton’s good friend, Mr. Rich, hung out in Israel to avoid financial crime charges until Bill Clinton pardoned him.

If you look at the lists of celebrities who support the anti-sport hunting HUSUS and PETA, and compare them to the list of names, including many $billionaires, in convicted child molester Jeffrey Epsteins’s private phone book, you find that many of the names of people that have visited “Lolita Island” are the same. Very strange indeed. The message for young women in the animal rights movement, who may rub up against these people is to keep your knees together, and for young boys, it is don’t touch your toes in their company.

I see where the last male northern white rhino has died. I was in Isiro, DRC, in 2005 and there wree still 15 alive in Garamba Park at the time. The Lords Resistance army led by Joseph Coney wiped them out by 2008. Coney come from the small Luau tribe which is the same tribe Barack Obama comes from. However, the main problem in DRC has always been corruption. I asked a police chief in Kinshasha who runs the Congo and he said very hard (meaning criminal) diamond dealers from Antwerp. People have been pointing the finger at Kind Leupold for decades but the fact is he was flat broke, never visited the Congo, and left the country in the hands of Jewish concessionaires from Belgium. They are that the Congo, the richest country in Africa, has gone no where, and they are really why the northen white rhino has gone extinct.

Stay tuned. I just printed out the entire - 97 page convicted child molestor Jeffrey Epstein mailing list, the complete PETA celebrity mailing list and the complete HSUS celebrity mailing list. When I have the time I will cross reference the three lists but a cursory glance shows that the same names just keep popping up on all three lists. I see where the NRA keeps saying they are going to look out for the interests of sport hunters, something they have never really done, well collating these three lists is a very good place to start. Who would have ever thought that Micheel Bloomberg would shows up on these lists but in fact he does. It almost looks like the animal rights movement is a Mossad Operation?

I see where the Humane Society of The United States, the largest anti-hunting group in the world,is in more deep doo doo, including more members leaving because of sexual hanky panky, as is the associated Fund For Animals that was started by Cleveland Amory with promotional help from the New York Times.
There is a web site worth googling called Humane Watch that makes a habit of following their downhill slide. Its worth following.
Also lots in the news about the huge problem of plastic pollution in all the oceans of the world but as yet no one in MSM is pointing a finger at $ billionaire Robert Schad of the anti-hunting Robert Schad Foundation. Schad supported the David Suzuki Foundation and the International Fund For Animals. He is the big money behind the grizzly bear hunting closure in B.C. He is also the environmentalist that made Husky Injection Moulding into the largest manufacturer of plastic bottle making machines in the world. He was once producing 80 billion plastic bottles a year in the USA alone, on his watch, and he had more factories in China. He replaced harmless green technology (recylable glass bottles, Cotton and paper bags) with a vile kind of plastic that breaks down in the oceans so the bottles can’t be traced back to the manufacturer. I believe he and his family should be held accountable and forced to pay for the clean up of plastic bottles in all of the world’s oceans.
On the positive side I hear that NRA Membership is now going through the roof with 500,000 new members this week alone and more hits for their membership hook up, than any other such site in the world.

I see by CNN that the woman who just shot up the u-tube center in California has appeared on videos promoting PETA. The animal rights movement is really hitting rock bottom these days with their various ex-leaders now caught of in child molesting and child trafficking allegations; Harvey Weinstein style sexual hanky panky allegations, and now both terrorism and murder. Pretty difficult for them to sink much lower unless they take up acting in Hollywood.

I see that the better Business Bureau has finally taken their financial rating for the HSUS to rock bottom. All those movie and rock stars behind HSUS should sell some of their many beach house properties to help prop up their darling HSUS.
There are huge lawyer fees and allegedly bail fees on the horizon.
The way things are going now it won’t be long before bashing harp seal pups over the head will be the new trend. Somebody should send Paul McCartney a baseball bat so he doesn’t miss the latest fashion.

CALIFORNIA Classic

Exactly one year ago, famed scientist and cultural icon, Stephen Hawking died in his Cambridge home at age 76. Remembered for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he shares his date of death with Pi Day––an annual celebration of the beloved mathematical constant and, of course, pie. And what better way to celebrate than with some wisdom from the great physicist himself? As Hawking told his audience during one of many well-attended guest lectures at UC Berkeley,

“Although science may solve the problem of how the Universe began, it can not answer the question: Why does the Universe bother to exist?”